Bearing Witness: Living with Ovarian Cancer

Patricia

All, everything that I understand I understand only because I love —from War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy Patricia hadn’t been in hospital since she was a child with tonsillitis. But one midsummer day when she was 49 years old, a mysterious pain hit her side. A pulled muscle perhaps? Four months later, she found out the truth: ovarian cancer. With three of her seven siblings having already died from unnatural causes, she faced the disease head on. And through the hell of it all, she found some unknown strength through faith in God, her husband, and friends from a newly discovered church. I FIRST DISCOVERED SOMETHING wrong on a July 7 when I had a pain in my side. I waited a couple of weeks to see if it would go away, but it didn’t. I went to my family doctor and he decided that it was probably a pulled muscle or something like that. So he sent me to a specialist who determined it was a pulled muscle, that I had pulled the muscle away from a rib. She gave me some painkillers and said that this would probably last about six weeks. I said, “Well, you know that it has already lasted about six weeks.” She said, “Oh well, sometimes it lasts a little bit longer.” So it got worse. The painkillers were ineffective. So I went back to my family doctor, and a specialist then booked me for a CT scan and an ultrasound in case it was gallbladder related. It was another six weeks until the CT scan, and the pain was getting very intense. This was October by this time. Finally, in the first week in October, I said I just couldn’t take it anymore, the pain was too intense. So with that my husband drove me into emergency and they started doing the tests. It was then around 55 Patricia Thanksgiving before they determined with blood tests and the CT scan that it was ovarian cancer. From there they shipped me off to the cancer centre, and there I started the chemotherapy. With that they scheduled chemotherapy. It was carboplatin and Taxol. The combination of those two was supposed to run for six sessions. So we did three of these sessions and then there was surgery scheduled, and then we did the other three sessions. We got to five sessions, and the doctor determined that it was ineffective and that the tumour was still growing. In surgery, the doctors removed quite a large tumour but said that there were many more small tumours on the bowels. The chemo didn’t kill the cancer that had spread, so we waited another month and started the Taxol. That was ineffective as well. There is one more thing that we tried, a pill form that is usually used with breast cancer . The problem was that I couldn’t keep anything down. The tumour is blocking my bowels, so I have a stomach-drain into a bag. I have to lock it off for an hour to absorb some of this pill. So we are just in the process of trying this pill, although this is the last resort. They can’t do another surgery because it is too spread in my bowels, and the doctor says it would destroy my bowels. I DON’T HAVE ANY CHILDREN. And while there are eight kids in my family, none of them have any cancer. My dad died of cancer, but it was Hodgkin’s disease. They said that was unrelated to my cancer. They said mine was coming from the same genetic defect as breast cancer. Other than that, my aunt had died of breast cancer and I had another aunt who died of lung cancer, both sisters of my mom. As well, a brother, my uncle on my mom’s side, died of throat cancer. But no ovarian cancer anywhere . One of my siblings died of suicide. My eldest brother was a schizophrenic as well, and although they diagnosed it as suicide, I don’t think that it was. I had another sister who was killed by a drunk driver, so I have lost three of my siblings. But personally, I had never been in hospital other than for my tonsils when I was 12. I worked in payroll, benefits, and pension administration , and I was totally healthy all the time. But then I started feeling more tired, stressed, and overweight. And there was...