American Women, Please Learn From What I Went Through

Last fall, in the sunroom where we eat our meals, my 11-year-old son and I sat at the dining table—he on one side, I on the other. Because of my low immunity, I sat apart from him, by an open window.Six months before this, a doctor had phoned me with the news: suspicious for malignancy. For quite some time, my body had been sending signs—fatigue, bloating, light bleeding—but I had dismissed them for various reasons. I’d been raised to diminish my needs; my doctors didn’t seem concerned; I’m a mother working two jobs and didn’t have time to be sick. The official diagnosis came shortly thereafter, during surgery: ovarian cancer.Dinner was quiet. I was usually the one who started the chitchat about school, swim team, and chemo side effects. But that evening, I was consumed by visions of other tumors, growing undetected in other bodies. “The silent killer” is ovarian cancer’s nickname. My cancer was so silent that two gynecologists hadn’t considered it as a possible diagnosis, and at least one radiologist had entirely missed my tumor—as wide as a peach and as long as my hand.While I was on tour for my first book, a work of fiction, many readers asked if it was autobiographical. I would answer that it was 1 percent based on real life and 99 percent imagination, without saying which was which, because I like my privacy, and I am essentially made up of tiny lockboxes, some of which are hidden even from me. Now all I could think about was real life—and the urge to write about it. But I felt conflicted. So, while stirring my bowl of bone broth, I asked my son for his thoughts. He kept his eyes down and didn’t speak for a long time.Ovarian cancer is the deadliest of all gynecological cancers. The American Cancer Society estimates that more than 21,000 women in the United States will receive a new ovarian-cancer diagnosis this year, and about 12,450 will die from the disease. Its five-year relative-survival rate is about 50 percent. By comparison, the rate for prostate cancer