Receiving a cancer diagnosis is a terrible blow, but for one patient the hits kept on coming, after she was diagnosed with four separate primary cancers within two months, in a landmark case involving an observant GP.

Doctors from Denmark are reporting the “extremely rare” case of a 70-year-old woman, who was diagnosed with cervical adenocarcinoma, invasive ductal cell carcinoma metastasis, melanoma and multiple basal cell carcinomas (BCCs).

“Patients diagnosed with quadruple synchronous primary cancers are extremely rare and… here, to the best of our knowledge, (is) the first case report of this combination of primary cancers,” write the doctors in BMJ Case Reports.

The woman’s experience started when she presented to her GP with postmenopausal bleeding, according to the doctors from the Zealand University Hospital in Roskilde and the Aalborg University Hospital in Aalborg.