This is my first contribution to this group, to which I owe so very much. I hope this will encourage you to share your own introductions to, and journeys with, this strange disease, whether it whispered or shouted.
It is called “the whispering cancer” because ovarian cancer has no distinct symptoms. In the year before the diagnosis, it seems to me I spent more time in doctors’ offices and had more x-rays and CT scans (head, chest, belly—but, for the belly, an x-ray, which cannot “see” ovarian cancer) than I have throughout the rest of my life. And yet, no one caught it until I went the rounds the second time with my complaints of constipation. Constipation! Late on a Wednesday afternoon a clinic physician I had never seen before palpated my belly, and had the nurse make me an appointment for a CT scan asap. The scan was Friday morning, and by Friday evening I was in the hospital talking to the gyn-oncologist, standing by my hospital bed in my hospital nightgown. Why didn’t I sit down? I don’t know.
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