I never thought that a person like me would share my story about surviving ovarian cancer.
I’m 23 years old and I was diagnosed October of 2008 – a month after my 22nd birthday. Like many young girls my age I didn’t think that something like this would happen to me.
Now, I am a person who believes that everything happens for a reason, but in October 2008, I couldn’t understand why this was happening to me.
On Friday, September 12th 2008 (my late grandmother’s birthday) I began to have pains in my stomach, I then became very ill with a 103 degree temperature. I didn’t think it was serious, but I still felt like I needed medial attention. I am not a very big fan of hospitals but for somehow I felt the urge to go to one.
My mother took me to the hospital where I was seen immediately. This being my very first time in the hospital, I had no idea what to expect. The nurses did a couple of tests and I kept expecting to go home soon. Well, how wrong was I! The doctor came to the room and told my mother and me, that I had appendicitis, a dermoid cyst on my ovaries, and that I needed surgery right away!
I was shocked! I looked at my mother and said, “What is going on?” I was so scared. This was all new to me since I had never even had a pap test or ultrasound before. My mother told the doctors that I needed a second opinion before we could do anything. My mother is a very Christian woman.
The following day we got our second opinion from a gynecologist. The doctor came in my room, looked me and my mother in our eyes and said, “You have a 16cm tumor (the size of a newborn baby’s head) growing from your left ovary and it maybe cancerous.”
I didn’t know what to think, and was silent. My mother cried.
I needed surgery immediately for this tumor that the doctors think had been growing since January 2008. I had no idea that this was going on in my body. Needless to say two days later, September 15th, 2008, I had my very first surgery ever where they removed my appendix and my left ovary (left oophorectomy). I cried a lot that day because I wanted to live and not die and I believed that God would see me through this very hard time in my life.
I recovered and left the hospital with an appointment to see a gynecologic oncologist. Three weeks after my surgery, he told me that I had ovarian cancer. For some reason there was a calm about me and I wanted to do everything in my power to fight this, so I went to see and oncologist who put me through a very intense chemotherapy treatment which ended January of 2009. In those months of doing chemotherapy I kept thinking to myself that God would get me through this, and he did.
August of 2009, I did have another scare where they did a right oophorectomy (removed my right ovary).
All of this has happened to me in just one year and I don’t regret anything that God has put me through – it has made me that much stronger. No, I might not have both my ovaries, and I might not be able to conceive children, or I be going through menopause and taking hormones and estrogen, and it might not seem like things are good but I am alive and loving every moment that I take a breath and look at my wonderful family and say to myself, “I am blessed”.
