My 6yr old daughter has a painless lump 1cm h x 3cm w on her chest a few inches below her nipple. Dr said its no big deal and if it was cancer she would have other symptoms. Is it possible I caught it early before other symptoms? I am still worried.

Well that would be an unusual place for lymphoma to appear. Nothing's impossible, unfortunately, but typically when nodes become swollen from lymphoma, they are nodes in the neck or groin. Furthermore, six is really, really young for a lymphoma diagnosis. The median age for diagnosis of a non-Hodgkin lymphoma is 66. Less than 2% are diagnosed under the age of 20. For Hodgkin's lymphoma, the median age is 38.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be worried, I don't know, it seems like it is better to be safe than sorry. I hate hearing about doctors blowing off patients' concerns. I think that the doctor owes you more of an explanation than "it's no big deal." It would not have taken him or her more than a minute to explain that, say, they see this a lot and it's never anything, or it's just a symptom of something benign. Now I think you should call the doctor's office and demand a better explanation than it's no big deal. Maybe next time they will stop and think, 'an explanation would be best.'

It's not true to say there would be no other symptoms. in lymphoma the first thing many people notice is a swollen painless lymph node that has persisted for a while, and there are no other symptoms. Sometimes there are other symptoms, sometimes not. In the case of some solid tumor cancers like lung cancer, people don't find out until the cancer has spread and starts to impinge upon some part of the body, like the spine, or their lungs, somewhere. Tumors don't develop nerve centers, so a tumor itself is not painful, but it does begin to press on other nerve endings.

With blood cancers- lymphoma, leukemia- because these cancers affect such a crucial part of the body-- white blood cells in various states of development -- when something goes wrong, the symptoms tend to be more noticeable-- fevers, fatigue, night sweats, symptoms like that.