20th cancerversary

This month is my 20^th cancer anniversary. I’ve written about my cancer experiences from time to time, and I’m never sure if I get it right. Of course, it’s my story, I know how it begins and ends, but I’m fuzzy on purpose. Am I doing any good?

Documenting the journey reminds me of my good fortune and keeps me grounded. But this story is also for others. It’s about aiming high, knowing good outcomes are possible. Cancer sucks, and sometimes it kills you but not always.

It was 1999. We were in the middle of moving from Charleston to Columbia, S.C. – a move known at our house as “The Big Mistake.” It was not the career accelerator I expected, and I was experiencing weird abdominal pain.

I found a wonderful family practice physician who didn’t think I was nuts. He sent me to a general surgeon, who said it was probably adhesions – scar tissue – from a hysterectomy I’d had several years earlier to alleviate painful periods.

Adhesions kind of glue everything together, so he’d go in with a scope through the navel and zap them apart. Surgery was no big deal, because this was just a quick little Friday morning outpatient procedure. I’d be back at work Monday. Except I woke up in a room, and I knew something was wrong.

It turned out to be Primary Peritoneal Cancer, a rare form of cancer that is almost the same thing as ovarian cancer (even though I had no ovaries). By the way, if your ovaries have been removed, there’s like a 99 percent chance you won’t get this.

The doctor said it blew him away completely, because cancer was the last thing he expected to see. He didn’t touch it, though. He called a gynecological oncologist from the operating room, and their collaboration helped spare my life.

I had Stage 3C, Grade 3 cancer. Statistics suggested a 25 percent chance of living five years, but my oncologist never discussed life expectancy. We just focused on the road ahead. I had surgery to remove the tumors. Surgery was followed by chemotherapy, which consisted a Taxol/Carboplatin cocktail infused every 21 days for about six months.

After chemo was completed, I would have another operation called “Second-Look Surgery.” The second-look was to biopsy what was left and see if microscopic cancer remained. If I still had cancer, I’d continue treatment, but if the biopsies were normal, I could spare my body the extra wear and tear.

My biopsy reports were negative, and if you don’t count breast cancer, I’ve been fine ever since.

In 1999, genetic testing wasn’t standard. Neither breast nor ovarian cancer runs in my family. Only when a routine mammogram led to a diagnosis of Ductal Carcinoma in Situ (DCIS) did they test me. It came back positive for the BRCA 1 mutation. That was 2015.

No one else in the family tested positive, but my father had early onset prostate cancer, which can be a sign of a BRCA mutation, so we just assume I inherited it from my dad. He passed away many years ago from something else. Because of my BRCA status, I had a bilateral mastectomy, which is an aggressive and certainly not typical treatment for DCIS.

After being diagnosed with cancer the first time, I was hungry for inspiration. I remember Googling “ovarian cancer survivors.” What came back in the search results was a pile of obituaries – so and so died of ovarian cancer, survivors include …

Yet, here I am. Twenty years later, happily retired and hopefully solvent for another 30 years. So much life ahead!

And that’s why every now and then, I put my story out there. I want you and the random Googler to know for every kind of cancer, every stage of cancer, really for every adversity out there – somebody beats the odds, and it might be you.