Christina was in her late thirties when she noticed something was wrong: a dull, cramping pain seemed to keep attacking the right side of her pelvis.
But the position of discomfort was mind-boggling. The painful cramps seemed to be coming from her right ovary, which had been removed two years earlier.
Her lack of ovaries was a result of the hysterectomy she had undergone to resolve debilitating menstrual symptoms related to a number of reproductive conditions.
But the lawyer was no stranger to pain, as he had a history of gynecological health problems. So “she just dealt with it.”
But months later a procedure followed that almost lasted 16 hours discovered a shock disease: stage 3 ovarian cancer.
Ovarian cancer is a rare form of the disease that develops in the ovaries, the female organs that produce eggs. It is often called a ‘silent killer’ because symptoms only appear late in the disease.
Christina wrote for The cut: ‘I was in surgery for another ten hours after they told Mark (her husband) what they had found.
‘It took them that long to remove everything. When I woke up, the surgeon came in to talk to me. “Do you want the good news or the bad news?” he asked.’
The bad news was that Christina had ovarian cancer that had spread to surrounding organs. The good news was that the surgeons thought they had removed everything.
She wrote: ‘I couldn’t believe it. I started crying, asked for my mother and my husband, and then fainted again.”
Her doctors discovered that the disease originated in a portion of ovarian tissue that surgeons had failed to remove two years earlier.
Christina’s diagnosis came just weeks before a surrogate mother was due to give birth to her and her husband’s second daughter.
The couple were unable to conceive due to Christina’s long history of reproductive problems, including endometriosis – where the lining of the uterus grows into other pelvic organs.
She also suffered from a condition called adenomyosis, in which the lining of the uterus grows into the muscle.
The disease is said to affect one percent of American women and leads to heavy bleeding and agonizing pain.
Some research has shown that both conditions can lead to fertility complications and the ability to carry a pregnancy to term.
For Christina and her husband Mark, these reproductive issues had made their search for a family exceptionally difficult.
About 18 months before her devastating diagnosis, she had given birth to a daughter, Sophie, who was born 18 weeks premature and lived for just two hours.
Ovarian cancer is a rare form of the disease that develops in the ovaries, the organs that produce eggs.
The American Cancer Society estimates that 19,700 women will be diagnosed with cancer and that half of patients will not survive more than five years.
Many women have recently spoken publicly about their experiences with the disease to alert others to the often missed symptoms.
Katie Wylie, 33, from Perth, Australia, noticed a tingling pain in her left leg. Even though she wasn’t worried about her health, she went to see a doctor.
After multiple tests, she was diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer, with tumors growing on both her ovaries.
And dr. Amy Fans shared her ovarian cancer story with her 45,000 followers on TikTok.
When she was just 30 years old, she experienced slight weight gain and “relentless heartburn.”
When she finally went to a doctor, she was also diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer.
Christina’s disease had become so widespread, she wrote, that it had caused intestinal blockages, contributing to her intense pain.
To completely remove the disease, doctors had to remove parts of her intestines and bladder.
She had to be fed through a PICC line, a tube inserted into a vein in the arm, and she needed an ostomy bag – a plastic bag attached to the outside of the body and connected to the large intestine in which urine and feces were collected. remained standing for at least a year.
Because of her treatments, Christina was too sick to go to Texas for the birth of her daughter Lily.
She wrote for The Cut, “I knew there was no point in going to Dallas. Between the stress of traveling, dealing with the ostomy bag and the bandages on my incisions, the PICC line, I knew I couldn’t do that. That was a hard pill to swallow. It was also difficult for Mark (her husband).’
Dr. Amy Fans shared her shocking ovarian cancer story with her 45,000 followers to warn others about the little-known symptoms
Kate Wylie, a 33-year-old, was also diagnosed with ovarian cancer and had to use an ostomy bag. When she underwent chemotherapy, her hair started to fall out
After the surgery, Christina underwent several grueling chemotherapy treatments to kill the remaining cancer cells.
But the treatment left her too exhausted to care for her newborn baby, causing her hair to fall out.
She said: “I wasn’t prepared for how emotional losing my hair would be,” she said. ‘I’m one of those girls: hair, face, skin, I love all those things. When my doctor told me I was going to lose my hair, eyelashes and eyebrows, I lost it again.
“For example, you took away my uterus, my ovaries and my fallopian tubes, and now you’re taking my hair and eyelashes? Everything that makes me a woman? What else can you take?’
Christina wrote that she was extremely ill for the first few months of Lily’s life, while her mother and husband did much of the work.
She said: ‘The first year of her life I felt super guilty. I couldn’t be a nice mother because I was sick and I was afraid she wasn’t happy. Looking back, I know she was happy.”
Finally, a year after her surgery, she had the ostomy bag removed and “started feeling normal again.”
Christina added: “It was like night and day. By then I was also done with chemo and was starting to feel normal again. That really changed things and made me feel comfortable in my body again.
‘Lily and I became closer and closer. The first time she said “Mama,” I took her on our first overnight trip together, to see a friend of mine. I was changing her diaper, and she looked up at me and said, “Mommy!” I grabbed my phone to record it. That was a great moment of connection.’
However, in February 2024, Christina’s cancer returned.
She said: ‘I wasn’t warm so I knew something was up. Lily, who is now two, did the same. One day she even said, “Mommy is sick.” Literally out of nowhere. That hurt to hear her say that.”
Shortly afterwards, Christina started chemotherapy again. Some days she feels better than others, but she has “accepted that I will have lifelong problems with this.”
And she doesn’t like broaching the subject of prognosis with her doctor: “I think I’ve just accepted it – that women have to live with it, and that I’m otherwise healthy and have to focus on that.”
‘I don’t feel like I’m going to die anytime soon. I can’t live like this, you know? There’s too much I want to do… and there’s so much I want to show Lily.
‘Sometimes I don’t know how Mark and I survived all this. Things were very, very dark.
“I think Lily helped us a lot in healing from the loss of our first child.
‘She is the light of our lives. And she makes sure I stay proactive about my own health because I want to be there for her as long as possible. We have achieved it, and we owe it to her.’
