Georgia woman fights shock, disbelief with aggressive action

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By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

(HealthDay News) -- The clue that led Jami Myers to realize she had ovarian cancer was fairly mundane, now that she thinks about it.

"It was something that a lot of women get," said Myers, 49, a nine-year cancer survivor who lives in suburban Atlanta. "It was a backache. I had been moving furniture so I assumed I had put something out in my back."

Her family doctor did what doctors usually do for a backache: She put her on over-the-counter pain medications.

"A week later it still wasn't better so I went back," Myers said. "Fortunately for me, I had a doctor who was really paying attention to my symptoms and to my family history."

At the time, Myers's mother had been fighting ovarian cancer for nine years. Myers said the doctor told her, "'With your family history, I want to make sure it's not the ovary.'" Because of that, she said, "they did an ultrasound, and that's when they found the tumor on the ovary."

It wasn't a large tumor. At first, in fact, the doctors thought it might just be a nasty looking cyst. But when they performed surgery to remove it in April 2000, they analyzed the lump and determined it was, indeed, ovarian cancer.

So while she was still under anesthesia, the surgeons went back in and removed the ovary and performed a hysterectomy.

Myers knew in advance that that might happen. "Going into the surgery, they did a cancer marker test, and it was elevated," she said. "There was concern it could be cancer. I knew if they found anything, I would end up having the more major surgery. They actually had a second doctor on standby just in case."

When she woke up in recovery, her doctor told her the news.

"It was just shock and disbelief," Myers said. "I was only 40. My mother was diagnosed at 63. I was so young for ovarian cancer. I knew what was ahead of me, and it really scared me. This could kill me, like it was slowly killing my mom."

Myers's ovarian cancer was staged at IIb, a category for fast-growing cancer. "If they hadn't looked at the backache, I could have easily been a stage III or IV by the time they diagnosed me," she said. She went through six rounds of chemotherapy, starting in April 2000 and finishing up that August. "I was never sick, but I had a lot of bone pain," Myers said. "I had a hard time walking, I was in so much pain. It's really not an achiness; it feels like someone has just hit your bones with something. It's an actual pain that goes into your shins."

Doctors tested her for the cancer marker every three months for the next two years. She remained cancer-free, but when they decided to test only every six months, it sent a pang of fear through her.

"Once you've had cancer, you have such a fear of it coming back that if there's anything you can do to keep it from coming back, you want to do that," she said. "I was in fear of, what if it's come back and I'm not going to have the test for another six months?"

Myers said she's been more proactive in dealing with her other cancer risks as well. In December 2008, a genetic test showed that she had an 87 percent chance of breast cancer so she had a prophylactic mastectomy earlier this year.

"I had the breasts removed and reconstruction done," she said.

"I had beaten one cancer, and I wasn't willing to wait to see when a second cancer would strike me," Myers said. "You can live a healthy lifestyle and eat all the right foods, but when you're predetermined and that predetermination is high, you don't want to wait to see when it will strike and hope you detect it early."