My Ovarian Cancer Diagnosis: Where It All Began
Photo by Xiefei via Adobe Stock
This year, I started going to a new breast specialist for my regular checkups that I need due to the breast cancer risk associated with being BRCA1-positive, and I had an appointment with her earlier this week. To get to this doctor’s office, I have to walk past a long hallway on the fourth floor of the hospital.
It’s not just any hallway; it’s familiar to me. At the far end of this hallway is the room where I was hospitalized when I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer five years ago.
In October 2018, I was sent to the ER by an Urgent Care doctor after an emergency CT scan showed multiple markers of ovarian cancer. I went to the ER on Wednesday, slept there overnight, and was admitted to the hospital the next day. From the ER, I was moved to a temporary room for a few hours until a bed opened up for me, and then, later in the day on Thursday, I was situated in my room at the end of a long hallway on the fourth floor of the hospital.
This room had three beds, separated by curtains, and mine was in the middle. On the left was a woman who often had family members visiting, circled around her praying and singing. To my right was a woman I don’t think I ever saw. But I heard her moaning in pain around the clock.
On Friday, my new gynecologic oncologist, whom I’d met when he’d examined me at 6am the day before after my night of non-sleep in the ER, performed a laparoscopic biopsy. Afterward, back in my hospital room recovering from that surgery, I remember my bloody hospital gown and bloody sheets. I remember standing in the bathroom with a nurse helping me put on a new pair of hospital-issue underwear, and a thick, bulky pad to catch the blood.
What else do I remember from my time in that room?
I remember early Saturday morning, as I was lying in bed, and my Mom and Dad were standing around me, my gynecologic oncologist came into my room to tell me the results of my biopsy — ovarian cancer, stage 3 — and my treatment plan, which I’d start immediately, while I was in the hospital.
From what I overheard while I was staying in that room, I pieced together information about the woman in the bed to the right of me, who moaned in pain all day and night. From what I remember, she was in her late-40s, with very difficult to manage pain, dying of cancer, and on her way to hospice.
I was 43-years-old, and had just been diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer. I listened to my roommate’s moans all day, but it was the worst in the middle of the night. When everything was otherwise quiet, and dark, and I was alone with the thoughts of my new life-threatening diagnosis, and the howls of pain coming from a dying woman with a similar disease just a few feet away from me.
After two nights and two days in this room, in the middle of the night on Saturday I was groggily lifted onto a stretcher and transported to a private room on the infusion floor in another wing of the hospital, where I’d start chemotherapy three days later, on Tuesday, after having my port implanted on Monday. Finally, on Wednesday, a week after I’d walked up the ramp and into the doors of the ER, I’d be released.
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Photo via Jennifer Garam
On the way to my breast specialist’s office earlier this week, when I walked past the fourth floor hallway in the hospital, where I once stayed in the very first days when my life forever changed, I paused. There were two women behind the nurses station, and I asked them what the name of this floor was.
They told me, and I said I was pretty sure I stayed on this hallway when I was first diagnosed with ovarian cancer five years ago.
While I was waiting in the exam room to be seen by my breast doctor, I took out my phone, opened up text messages, and typed the floor name the hospital staff members had just told me into the search box. Up popped several texts from October 2018 with that floor name, along with a room number, in a string of texts I’d sent friends and family members, telling them where to go when they visited me in the hospital.
After my appointment with my breast specialist, I pushed through the heavy exit door to leave her practice, and paused again when I passed the nurses station at the end of the long hallway on the fourth floor.
“I definitely stayed here,” I told the women behind the nurses station. “I looked it up. And this was my room number,” I said, before reading it off.
“I had a feeling you were going to say that room!” one of the women exclaimed.
“I picture you with dark hair,” the other one said.
I asked if they both worked on this hallway in October 2018 and they both said yes. I told them that when I was here I had dark hair; I stopped coloring it and went gray when my hair grew back after cancer treatment.
I don’t specifically remember them and they don’t specifically remember me, except I have a feeling that our paths may have crossed before, five years ago in the early days of October 2018 when my life irrevocably changed. That maybe they were sitting behind that same desk when I was wheeled to that room at the end of the hall from my temporary room after my night in the emergency room, or taken to and from the OR where I had my laparoscopic biopsy, or was transported past them in the middle of the night on a stretcher on the way to my new room in the infusion unit. When I had long, dark hair, before I lost it all in the weeks to come from my chemotherapy regimen.
To get to and from my new doctor’s office, I have to walk by that hallway. And every time I pass it, I like to pause, and reflect, about the time I spent there and what I went through, in the middle bed of the last room on the left side at the end of the hallway on the fourth floor, the week I was in the hospital when I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. And how my time there, and what I went through in those days, and the months after, changed me forever, for the better.
