A personal essay of living with ovarian cancer by Nishtha of India. After ovarian cancer, ladies woke up early every day to breathe deep, make positivity origami and release them in the air. Raged through the idea of death, barging into the light. Except, none of this happened. Never. Low Grade Serous Ovarian Cancer – LGSOC, sounds like a cool name of a metal band, but all it is our hope and traumas banded together. We lay on our backs, …

Instead of a carefree life in her twenties, Emily has lived in the shadow of cancer. She says “there is a lot that is challenging and difficult including infertility. The fear and isolation of living in the unknown and not being able to plan for years ahead is very real. I find myself wondering if I will see my daughter reach specific milestones.”

“Yet at the same time, I appreciate the little things in every day so much more. Family is very important to me and we make spending time and taking holidays together a priority.”

“I’d go as far to say that the infertility has been worse than the cancer diagnosis for me,” she said. “I’d planned a life with children. It’s brought a lot of guilt that I can’t give my husband children and seeing all my friends have their babies over the years hasn’t been easy at times.”

“I want people to know that you have the right to push for more testing if something doesn’t feel right. I think many doctors dismiss the concerns of younger women but ovarian cancer does not discriminate by age.”

“Over the course of six months I saw a doctor over 15 times,” Hannah said. “Nobody suspected cancer. They only found it because I was referred to a specialist to see if I had Crohn’s disease and the referral included a blood test to rule out bowel and ovarian cancer.”

“I was like any other 27-year-old, focused on my career and hopeful to one day have a family,” she said. “But my daily life was plagued with unexplained and misdiagnosed ongoing pain. This pain disrupted my sleep, work life, social life, and everything in between. For years, I was brushed off by doctors and given simple solutions and explanations that still didn’t resolve my pain.”