When 58-year-old Karen Howley LaCamera went to the emergency room in January 2018 with acute pain in her abdomen, she thought she was having another gallbladder attack. The doctors in the ER ordered a CT scan and told her she’d probably need surgery to remove her gallbladder if things didn’t improve. She was released later that night. But when she got home, the ER doctor called to tell her that the problem wasn’t her gallbladder. It was a tumor the size of an orange sitting on her ovary.
Several tests and surgeries and a biopsy later, LaCamera, who lives in Sudbury, Massachusetts, was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. “I was just like, Wow,” she recalls. “When I look back, I think about the symptoms I disregarded.”
LaCamera says she “always felt discomfort and excused it.” She had frequent urination and pain in her abdomen, pelvis, and back. She also had bloating, or as she called it, a tummy roll. “No matter what I did for exercise, I couldn’t get rid of it,” she says. She thought it was just because she was getting older.
When LaCamera went in for surgery, doctors found that the cancer had spread to 11 organs.
LaCamera isn’t alone in missing the symptoms of ovarian cancer.
“The common symptoms of ovarian cancer are nondescript,” says B.J. Rimel, MD, director of cancer clinical trials and an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology in the division of gynecologic oncology at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles.
That’s why the cancer is usually not caught until later stages, when it can be deadly. “It’s a really tricky thing. My heart breaks for all these women who go from doctor to doctor, [looking for answers],” Dr. Rimel says.
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