Mystery = solved. I was hoping it would be something crazy, like an inferior twin I had absorbed while we were competing for resources in the womb, but an extra rib is probably the next-best thing.
Turns out this "neck mass" has been there all along. It's an accessory first rib or cervical rib—an extra rib bone that lives above where a normal human's first rib would be. The head and neck specialist I saw today said I was born with it and I will go the rest of my life with it, and there is almost no chance it will ever become symptomatic. He described it as "a rare, but not unheard-of, anatomical abnormality."
These were welcome words after I had spent the last month wondering what was protruding out of my neck. All I knew was that it wasn't cancer, which, to my neurotic brain, meant everything else in all of known and unknown medical science was on the table. And with everything on the table, who knew what unspeakably torturous acts of testing and treatment might lie ahead.
Not that the exam today was entirely pleasant. It began with two doctors performing a full head and neck exam plus an extensive manual inspection of the anomaly. In followed about three more doctors, then two or three of their students, then a dental school prof and four or five of his students, each examining my neck to various degrees. They speculated early on that a cervical rib was the culprit, so by the time the students were paraded through, I felt more like a case study than a patient. A circus exhibit. "Here we have a young lady with an accessory rib," said dental-school guy to his students. They filed past one by one and mashed around on the protrusion.
A review of the CT scan images confirmed the cervical rib, placing me in a relatively small group (one in 500 people, according to Wikipedia) of similar mutants. Sadly, no special powers come along with the trait, but not too many downsides appear to either. At least one source seems to suspect a link between rib anomalies and early childhood cancer, for which I'd be well out of the woods by now, and Wikipedia suggests a possible but pretty slight risk of something called thoracic outlet syndrome.
So rather than cancer or any other of a million potential health threats, instead all I have is (finally) a response to that "tell us something interesting about yourself" prompt that comes up at work retreats and the like. It was such a relief that I grinned a few times during the latter half of my exam. When the doctor said I had "a rare, but not unheard-of, anatomical abnormality," I said, "So basically, a cool new fact about me?"
"A cool new fact about you," he replied.
Weird, but I'll take it.
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