It was the kind of TDY that makes you curse Murphy, or at the very least look around to see where the hidden cameras are….the last thing on my mind was cancer.
In April of 2023, I was working as a Physician Assistant 60 hours a week seeing 160 patients, managing three kids, and working for two non-profits. At the very least I was busy, but more realistically, an insane pace to keep. I recognized that I was starting to experience some abdominal bloating and weight gain, but chalked it up to eating out too often due to our schedule, or my lack of time to exercise. Admonishing myself, I compromised and purchased the latest trend on Instagram, a bodysuit that promised to give me a “snatched” waist. I never thought twice about the change in bowel pattern, or the fact that I thought it was normal to sleep at the library during my son’s tutoring lessons. I was a military spouse, I knew how to hang on and endure. Until I couldn’t.
My last “normal weekend” was spent kayaking with the kids; my teenage son challenged me to carry both kayaks back to our warehouse at the same time, saving an extra trip. The next day at work I felt pain in my right leg but figured that I had pulled a hamstring, or aggravated my sciatic nerve. Knowing how many patients would be affected if I canceled my schedule to see my own doctor, I kept taking ibuprofen and carried on, business as usual.
The morning of April 19, I woke up before dawn and was laying in bed. I started to feel around my abdomen because the bloating was still present when I felt a mass in my abdomen, just below my belly button. It was fist-sized, hard, and immobile. I immediately woke my husband to see if he could feel it too, and he did while he whispered that I was scaring him. My first stop at work that morning was with a PA who worked 15 years in gynecology and asked her to perform an abdominal exam on me. Her eyes met mine as I was looking up at her from the exam table as she said that I needed to get to a doctor immediately.
The rest of that day is somewhat of a blur, my GYN appointment and ultrasound revealed an 8 cm tumor on my left ovary, my tumor markers CA-125 was three times the upper limits of normal, and then the MRI demonstrated that actually the tumor was 16.5 x 14.5 x 8 cm – basically the size of a football in my stomach, and was cancerous until proven otherwise. One week later I found myself on the operating table twice in one day; the first to place an IVC filter because the leg pain that I had for a week was actually two blood clots in my right calf, and then a radical hysterectomy with omentum resection and lymph node dissection to allow for the tumor to be removed and appropriate staging. There were six days between the discovery of the tumor and my surgery with the pathology results; six days where we weren’t sure if the leg pain was a metastasis and if I would be present last Christmas. Twenty years as a military spouse, and we had prepared for my husband’s potential death prior to him leaving every single time – not once had we ever talked about the possibility of mine.
Once the provider, I was now the patient. Pathology confirmed Ovarian cancer and was treated with six rounds of chemotherapy. I also tested positive for the BRCA2 gene mutation and elected to pursue a bilateral mastectomy last December to mitigate my risk of breast cancer. In the last 18 months, I have felt like I was in the hospital more as a patient than when I actually worked in one.
The lessons that continue to haunt me is that cancer never hurt. I had vague symptoms that I explained away 20 different ways, dismissing my own need for evaluation because I was young, fit, and quite honestly never thought cancer would happen to me, especially at 42. That ignorance almost killed me. I also think about the blood clots in my leg, and how they could have killed me faster than the cancer could have – not knowing that cancer was my risk factor, I didn’t even have deep vein thrombosis on my radar. I didn’t smoke, wasn’t on oral contraceptives and didn’t present with known risk factors.
How often have I set up the kids’ well checks, or dentist appointments only to reschedule mine or postpone because “something came up?” All too often military spouses are in survival mode, we endure to get through the next thing – keeping our heads down until it’s time to exhale. So, I challenge you to give yourself a gut check – what appointments have you canceled, rescheduled or put off? Make the call. Today. For me. Make my journey mean something – even if it just means one more life is saved.