My Belly Button Saved My Life - HuffPost

I went to an ovarian cancer awareness walk a decade before I was diagnosed with it at the age of 44.

Unfortunately, every one of these symptoms could be a sign of something else, so we are often misdiagnosed and don’t know we have ovarian cancer until it’s already advanced.

The blood test found elevated levels of cancer antigen 125, a tumor marker that is not an entirely reliable indicator of ovarian cancer.

There seem to be as many ways to find the cancer as there are people who have it.

According to the American Cancer Society, that’s 1 in 78 people with ovaries, of all ages.

A Pap smear doesn’t detect ovarian cancer, and there’s no ovarian version of a mammogram.

Among the people in my online support groups, some discovered their cancer while they were pregnant, or trying to figure out why they weren’t getting pregnant.

It only occurred to me that this could have been a sign of ovarian cancer after 13 months of racking my brain trying to think of symptoms I missed. .

When I met my gynecologic oncologist over videoconference, she told me, “Ovarian cancer isn’t curable, but it is treatable.”.

She removed all the cancer she could see, and my blood work following surgery showed lowered levels of CA-125 as well as another tumor marker called human epididymis protein 4 (HE4).

If it comes back, by the time it comes back, I hope ovarian cancer research will have led to treatment for all future expressions of my cancer.

“Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month.” .

“Why didn’t we know that it’s Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month?”.

Maybe for the same reason I didn’t realize I had ovarian cancer, even though I’d been to an awareness walk.

Since my diagnosis, when I tell my friends that a Pap smear cannot detect ovarian cancer, I also give them the rundown of the symptoms to watch for.

My understanding is that it doesn’t necessarily matter when we detect ovarian cancer if we don’t have a way to cure it