Ohio Mom Discovered Hidden Cancer After Falling at Daughter's Game: She Calls It 'One of the Best Days' (Exclusive)

"The minute you think you’ve seen it all, something else comes in that surprises you even more," Elizabeth Gross' doctor tells PEOPLE

Most people might think taking a tumble down a set of bleachers would be a bad thing — but not Elizabeth Gross.

“I’m very happy that I fell,” the 54-year-old mom of one tells PEOPLE. “It was probably one of the best days of my life.”

Here's why: The accident led to a cancer diagnosis with enough time for successful treatment.

“We live in a world of surprise,” Gross' doctor Georgia Zachopoulos says. “The minute you think you’ve seen it all, something else comes in that surprises you even more.”

The Kent, Ohio, resident says she tripped as she was leaving 19-year-old daughter Page’s volleyball match in October. As she was coming down the steps, she put her hand on a loose railing and lost her balance.

“It was a big fall,” Gross says. “Afterward, my shin started bruising and my ankle, so the next morning I went to urgent care. They took X-rays, but couldn’t do my neck or back so they suggested I go to the Cleveland Clinic.”

After doing a barrage of tests at the emergency department of Cleveland Clinic Akron General, doctors still didn’t find anything broken or sprained. But they detected something else.

Zachopoulos, the emergency medicine doctor caring for Gross that day, told Gross that a CT scan revealed a mass on her thyroid, suggesting another complication — ultimately determined to be thyroid cancer — while Gross was already dealing with leukemia.

“If she had never fallen, there would have never been an indication to get this particular imaging study of her neck,’’ Zachopoulos tells PEOPLE. “It’s difficult to say for how long — or if it would have ever been detected.”

Zachopoulos says Gross' preexisting leukemia diagnosis could have been a false lead of sorts.

“Something like a thyroid cancer can be very difficult [to diagnose],” she says. “In this case, the symptoms were attributed to a totally different underlying pathophysiology. And kudos to our patient who followed up and got a diagnosis pretty quickly and subsequently was able to get the appropriate treatment.”

Gross recalls that Zachopoulos “took the time to really talk to me about it and encouraged me to get it checked.”

She called her oncologist right away. At that point, he had been treating her for about a decade for her rare type of leukemia, myelofibrosis, for which she was diagnosed in 2012. (Gross says she has had melanoma removed as well, around the time she learned she had leukemia.)

The image of a mass on her thyroid was the missing piece of a puzzle Gross didn't even know she was trying to solve. She'd previously told her medical team that she was struggling with fatigue and not feeling well, but that was attributed to the leukemia.

“I would literally sleep eight to 10 hours a night, have energy for about two hours, and then have to go back to sleep again,” Gross says now. “I’d have another hour or two of energy and that’s all I’d have for the day.”

She says she had to parse what she could do each day. Attending daughter Page’s volleyball games, like she did when she fell in the fall, would take every ounce of energy she had.

“I would sleep in the car while my husband Marc drove,” Gross says. “I would use my energy to cheer at the game, but then I would sleep all the way back home.”

She says before her fall, her doctors struggled with finding a cause for her fatigue since her leukemia seemed to be well-managed. But with the new information after her CT scan from the fall, her oncologist ordered a biopsy of her thyroid, which revealed the truth: papillary thyroid cancer.

On Valentine’s Day, she had surgery to remove it and started to feel more energetic within hours.

She is able to do yard work again and enjoying life a lot more, she says. She dropped 15 pounds in two months.

"I'm a normal person,” she says. “I still get very tired because of the leukemia treatment, but at least I’m back to that baseline and can be more active.”

Gross calls herself a “three time cancer thriver."

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