While celebrating the July Fourth holiday last year on a boat in Tyler, Texas, Dr. Julianne Santarosa received the results from her full-body MRI scan. What she saw put a damper on the festivities.
Radiologists at Prenuvo, which performed the scan, had identified a nodule in her lungs. Santarosa, who works as a spinal access surgeon in Dallas, could see the spot circled as she looked at the images from the patient portal on her phone.
“I was like, unless I swallowed a taco chip, that something should not be there,” she told CNBC in an interview.
Before paying $2,500 for the Prenuvo scan, Santarosa, who was 41 at the time, hadn’t felt any pain in and around her lungs and had no reason to suspect anything specific was wrong. Rather, she’d felt generally off since going through in vitro fertilization and had a gut feeling she should do the scan after seeing a Prenuvo ad on Facebook
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The day after seeing her Prenuvo results, Santarosa had a follow-up CT scan at a local hospital. The nodule was cancerous. She had it removed the following week.