I don’t think anyone is prepared for the call when it happens. I can still hear my call as clearly as day. “I’ve been trying to figure out all morning how to tell you this… you have ovarian cancer, it’s aggressive, we need to get you to an oncologist quickly.” I was just 36 years old. I was a healthy, single mom of two young children. This can’t be happening to me is all I could think. I knew without a doubt at that point in time, Siteman Cancer Center is where I wanted to be treated.
Within two business days of hearing those words, ‘you have cancer’, I’d meet with my lead oncologist, Dr. Andrea Hagemann. Four days later, I was undergoing a full debulking procedure where they’d perform a full hysterectomy, including cervix, remove my omentum, and thoroughly check the rest of my abdominal cavity, including my bowels. I would be left with a 13” incision down the middle of my abdomen, in full fledged menopause, hanging on to the words my oncologist would tell me – “I think we got it all, it appears to be an early-stage diagnosis.” Two weeks later I’d learn that despite only having an 18% chance of being diagnosed in the early stages, I was one of the ‘lucky’ few. I’d also learn that I had endometrial cancer as well, resulting in the medical team deciding that six rounds of chemotherapy (a combination of Carbo and Taxol) would be needed, versus the four that we had once contemplated. On July 3, 2017, I would receive my N.E.D report: No evidence of disease! To date, I’ve been fortunate to remain recurrence free -someone knock on some wood for me!
This will be my 7th year riding and raising funds with my GynOnc Teal on Wheels teams for Pedal the Cause - I don't ride solely for myself... I ride for both of my grandfathers who battled two different types of lung cancer, my grandmother who's a breast cancer survivor, my Dad, who's a non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and prostrate cancer thriver and of course, all of those we've lost along the way. We all deserve a world where hearing the words "you have cancer" doesn't feel like a death sentence because treatments exist to give us all a fighting chance at overcoming. We deserve a world without cancer!
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