By JANE LUCAS
I can remember the day like it was yesterday. It was October 2011 and I had been to a yoga class the day before, when I first felt a pain in my right side. Thinking I’d just pulled a muscle from one of the yoga poses I shrugged it off as nothing.
Little did I know at the time, but that pain in my abdomen was the first moment ovarian cancer made itself known as it had taken hold in my body. This was the start of something that would change the course of the rest of my life.
When the pain didn’t go away for a few days and seemed to be getting sharper I decided to visit the GP to get it checked out.
The doctor felt a mass in my abdominal area which I was told was similar in size to that of a five month pregnant belly. I told her with a guilty grin that I just thought I had been eating too much cheese!
Everything after that moment happened, so quick. Initially the tests came back to show a cyst and I was sent in for an ultrasound, and then they told me it was a fibroid (benign tumour). It wasn’t until I went in for an optional MRI scan that they told me it was cancer.
I was sent into surgery in November where they were able to remove the whole mass intact. All of the diseased cells were encapsulated within the tumour which was a good sign, according to the doctor. The cells however displayed traits of gastrointestinal cells so rather than an ovarian cancer they suspected it to be secondary from somewhere else.
In January 2012 after six weeks of tests and scans to determine whether the cancer was in fact secondary, I received the final diagnosis that it was a rare subtype of a primary ovarian cancer. It was stage one so thanks to this early detection and the success in surgery, I didn’t need to undergo any aggressive ongoing treatment like chemotherapy.