What symptoms did you notice before being diagnosed with cancer?

I’ll have to answer for my mother, because I’ve been told my spinal cord cancer was present from birth. It wasn’t diagnosed until the tumor was large enough to paralyze me (more on that in a moment). In the spring of 1977, my mom went into preterm labor with me. I was her first pregnancy and the obstetrician was the same one who’d delivered her in the fifties. It was a hard birth, and they bruised her kidneys trying to get me out. Once I was on the table, the delivery room staff noticed that something was…off. I didn’t move correctly. More accurately, sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t. Something wasn’t right, although no one could say exactly what. A discussion was held, and soon we parted ways…Mom for the recovery room, me for a better hospital on the other side of the state.