Many women who get ovarian cancer don’t realise it until it’s too late – yet identifying the symptoms and dealing with them early is the key to survival.
The symptoms are both so vague and so common that we can put them down to just not feeling well, menopause, the common “oh, it’s just old age” and a busy lifestyle.
The main risk factor is one none of us can do anything about: age. Ovarian cancer sufferers tend to be over 50 – but it can and does affect women of all ages. But one of the other key risk factors is being a Caucasian woman in a western country with a high standard of living. That's quite a lot of us!
I was 42 when I began to feel something wasn’t right.
I had a busy executive job, my children were both at university, I was normal weight, kept healthy and exercised vigorously not as often as I liked but at least twice a week but my abdomen was bigger than it should be and I was regularly experiencing really shocking – often crippling - pelvic pain for no apparent reason. If I tell you it felt worse than childbirth, you might have an idea of how bad these bouts were. I also felt really tired.
I was then living in Canberra and I visited two GPs. It took a third GP to appreciate that I wasn't just being 'pre-menopausal'. The GP ordered further tests, and then referred me immediately to a gynaecological oncologist in Sydney. What began then was treatment involving surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy and a change to our lives - which was nothing about 'change of life'!
My work was ver good to me, enabling me to work remotely when necessary for treatment, to reduce my hours and take significant time off.
However, around two years after my initial treatment, my husband and I had to move cities, and I changed jobs to what turned out to be a much more stressful job in quite a hostile environment where I was expected to work 70 to 80 hours a week. The job was a big mistake for many reasons.
I started to feel unwell again, and the oncologist told me that he was worried about a possible secondary cancer so I had some further precautionary treatment.
Today, I am healthy, other than for fairly normal (almost) 51-year-old complaints. I exercise regularly, I feel fit and healthy most of the time, but not all the time. When I get an unexplained pain, I tend to worry that it's come back again. I also left the awful job and started working from home doing work which doesn't pay anywhere near as much but has its own challenges and keeps me very busy. I also make sure we go on a holiday each year.
The key for me in being a survivor of ovarian cancer was being absolutely certain within myself that there was something not right. If I had listened to the first doctor, and then the second, I think I probably wouldn’t be alive now.
But because I insisted on being more thoroughly investigated, it led to immediate treatment and a much better chance of getting better. For me, the treatment wasn't the issue, but the diagnosis was. I never thought for a moment that I wouldn’t survive – even when I was feeling really, really bad with treatment.
One of my children is now about to embark upon studying to be a medical oncologist. This is a wonderful achievement for him but he says that he first became interested in the field as he watched me sink to rock-bottom and then slowly, but surely, come back - if not to 100% , but at least around 90% of my 42-year-old self. That, in itself, is another good to come out of this experience for our family and we do feel blessed.
Experts such as A/Professor Deborah Marsh from the Kolling Institute and Ovarian Cancer Australia say that the symptoms that are reported most frequently are:
- abdominal or pelvic pain
- increased abdominal size or persistent abdominal bleeding
- needing to urinate more frequently or urgently
- feeling full even after eating a small amount of food.
If you have any of these symptoms, and if they are new and you have experienced them multiple times during a four week timeframe, then please visit your GP. And if you're not satisfied, visit another and so forth.
If you wish to discuss your symptoms or the support services available from Ovarian Cancer Australia, call 1300 660 334.
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