My tale begins in June of 2008.
The middle of that month, a few days after my 54th birthday, I noticed a brownish discharge in my panties. It lasted only two days, and I might have ignored it, except that the local radio stations since the previous September had been running PSAs about ovarian cancer. About how vaginal bleeding was one of the symptoms. So even though I had no insurance (I hadn't worked full time for over a year) I got in to be seen at my gynecologist's.
Since I couldn't tolerate an in-office endometrial biopsy (I think that's right?), I was scheduled for a trans-abdominal ultrasound the 1st of July.
The report came back showing an apparent thickening of the endometrial wall, and my gynecologist performed a D&C on me the last day of July.
A couple of weeks later, my gynecologist gave me the good news: the thickening was only dried blood from a normal post-menopausal uterine "nosebleed," as he described it. My uterus was atrophic, that was all. Getting old and dry and wrinkly on the inside as well as the out!
Forward, then, to January 29th of this year, 2010. I noticed the same sort of brownish spotting again. Four days later it was still happening, and resembled the sludge I used to get at the end of my periods. I prayed it would stop, and that it was the same thing as I experienced in June 2008.
A little over a week after the spotting began, I began to feel pain in my lower abdomen. It mostly felt like indigestion, and to be sure, there was a lot of 24-hour flu going around. But sometimes it felt like period cramps. By the time the spotting-- never red or severe, but now unrelenting-- had been going on for two weeks, thoughts of ovarian cancer again were creeping into my head. I had no bloating, no backaches, no unusual tiredness-- but the What If kept eating at me.
It made me depressed and angry.
I knew that never having borne children is one of the risk factors, and it was just
no fair. Here I hadn't been able to use these organs for the purpose God gave them to me, and now were they going to strike back and be my death? I remembered a jumble of things I'd read about ovarian cancer back in June '08, about the low survival rate. I was upset at myself that I was still only partially-employed and still had no insurance. My life seemed like a failure. How could I pay for my care, if it was ovarian cancer? Maybe I should keep my mouth shut about my symptoms and do the honorable thing and just die.
But that weekend (Valentine's Day), I got to thinking of some very good friends who fought breast cancer and successfully came out the other side. If I just gave up, wouldn't that be an insult to them?
And maybe it wasn't ovarian cancer anyway. I went online and read that maybe the spotting and cramping were more consonant with endometrial cancer, which apparently could be taken care of by a hysterectomy. The next day, I called my gynecologist's office an got an appointment for the following Wednesday.
When I saw him, my gyne. confirmed that the spotting was indeed blood. He immediately booked me for another ultrasound two days later-- in his own office, so he could do it for me for free. I posted on Facebook that I had a medical test scheduled and would my friends please pray for me.
I was a nervous wreck when I arrived at the office for my ultrasound Friday, February 19th, but settled down once the test began. I did NOT think it was a good sign when the operator had me return to the ultrasound room for a couple more goes, even after I'd emptied my bladder, but I could only wait and see. Happily, I didn't have to wait too long . . . after several minutes, my gynecologist came into the exam room where I was waiting and told me the results weren't what he'd hoped to reveal to me.
Seems that between July 2008 and February 2010 my right ovary had swelled up from 2.2 cm to about 9.7 cm. He showed me the sonogram and yep, there it was, looking like one of those nesting dolls, all big and oval with a transparent-looking septation off of one end like a head. At my age, he said, he didn't see how it could be other than malignant. But, he said, it didn't have to be fatal. And the fact I had no insurance was not going to keep me from getting care. He was going to refer me to a colleague of his, one of the best gynecological oncologists in the region, who would take good care of me.
Funny, I'd envisioned throwing a major hissy fit at the injustice of it all should I get this news. But I could tell people were praying for me. I rallied more friends and family to do that over the next few days, and so I never experienced the paralysis and crying jags so many people do when they hear the C-word applied to them. A lot of theological philosophizing and interior drama ("Oh, this may be the Last Time I do this or that!!") but no depression or despondency, praise the Lord!
My first appointment with the G-O was the 1st of March. He examined me and said, "It doesn't feel like a cancer." That gave me hope that maybe I'd beaten the odds. And, he didn't think the spotting was connected to the ovarian mass. He performed a D&C on me the following Friday the 5th, and sure enough, the bleeding was just more atrophy exhibiting itself. Otherwise, my uterus was perfectly healthy. The procedure took care of the bleeding and I haven't had it since.
CT scan on March 15th didn't reveal anything alarming about the right ovary or anything else in the gynecological department . . . three-day scare over an indeterminate lesion spotted on my liver, but a followup ultrasound showed that to be a benign cyst.
This got me remembering all the cysts I've had and forgotten in my lifetime. Maybe this ovarian thing was just another of the same. I was scheduled for my TAH on the 25th of March. But my pain was pretty well gone-- just some pressure, sometimes-- and I'd think, good grief, do I really have to go through with this? Such a blinking hassle! Still, I knew I had to have the surgery-- even if the ovarian tumor was benign, it was still growing and could cause mechanical trouble.
Two days before my surgery date, I came down with a bad cold. Day before, I called and told the G-O's nurse that I felt like ten snowplows had ground over me. Nope, she said, they weren't operating on me in that condition. Call her back when I was over it and they'd reschedule.
I did, and what with the G-O's schedule, the schedule of the friend who was my transportation and medical info proxy, and my own schedule (worked around symphony concert tickets I had and choir rehearsals I wanted to make it to), my TAH was reset for the 22nd.
It had to be abdominal, regardless, so the surgeon could get a good look around. He would take both ovaries, uterus, cervix, the appendix, and samplings of various other things to send them to the lab-- just to make sure. But he was still optimistic we weren't dealing with cancer here.
My surgery April 22nd went well. Much less post-op pain and swelling than I'd expected, and I was able to sit up in a chair for several hours the next day and walk around as well. My G-O came in that morning and told me that the mass was only 6 cm or so and was a "low malignant potential tumor." Not as good a result as I'd hoped, but good enough. No chemo or anything like that required.
Well. I was discharged Monday the 26th, and Tuesday the 27th the PA at the G-O's office called me with the lab report. Guess what: Even my surgeon is not God. Turns out that the right ovarian mass was a Stage 1A, Grade 1 cancer after all. They took, in her words "a gazillion" other samples and everything else was negative and clean.
However . . . the tumor ruptured during surgery (which the lab didn't know), so the G-O himself puts it at Stage 1C.
So there we are. I have my followup appointment with my G-O and his PA this Monday the 10th, when I'm sure we'll discuss my ongoing treatment. And when I hope to find out, ever so discreetly, how the thing came to rupture. I mean, seeing as how that'll probably mean the difference between just keeping an eye on things and several rounds of yucky and expensive chemo . . .
Two weeks post-op I'm recovering well and have to remind myself not to do anything strenuous. People all over creation continue to pray for me, and it's making all the difference in my equilibrium and state of mind. I'll see how I feel about it once the chemo starts (as I assume it will), or down the road if the blinking cancer comes back. But right now, things with me are pretty good. After all, if I hadn't had that unrelated uterine bleeding, I wouldn't have gone to my gynecologist when I did. And if he hadn't been so diligent,
the tumor wouldn't've been discovered till it was Stage 3 or 4, the way these things usually are.
So if I had to get ovarian cancer (and the question isn't "Why me?" it's "Why not me?"), the way it's happened has been pretty providential.
My Ovarian Cancer Story-- So Far
