When Cancer Comes Back

You never expect to get a diagnosis of cancer, but what about when it comes back?

BY Sherry Ballou Hanson

PUBLISHED November 18, 2019

Sherry Hanson has published hundreds of articles, essays and poems. In 2013 she won a MORE Award for excellence in reporting on musculoskeletal issues from the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons (AAOS). She also won the 2014 Paumanok Award for Poetry from Farmingdale State College, Farmingdale, NY.

Sherry is a three-time survivor of ovarian cancer and volunteers in the “Survivors Teaching Students” program for the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund Alliance of Oregon and Southwest Washington. She is also a volunteer Scientific Research Advocate for the Knight Cancer Institute, affiliated with Oregon Health Science University in Portland, Oregon.

“We think we got it all.” I clung to those words after ovarian cancer surgery in May of 2009. After the treatment, my toes went numb and my hands were fairly useless. I stumbled over my feet and walked into walls. But my hair and eyebrows came back, along with my energy and my appetite, that daily cup of coffee… even a glass of wine! I worked out as best I could and took up running after a hiatus of almost twenty years. At this point, my odds of survival were 60%.
         
But on January 28, 2011 a CT scan revealed an enlarged lymph node high up in my abdomen. The CA-125 blood test showed that my numbers had begun to rise sometime after April of 2010. I hit forty in February 2011, had the scan, and there it was. One lymph node and two “suspicious areas” lower down, where we had expected a relapse if loose cancer cells settled and bored into an internal organ. But there did not appear to be any organ involvement. “We could no nothing,” said my oncologist. “Or we could do surgery or chemotherapy, or both.”

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