‘With breast cancer you get well looked after. But with ovarian, no’
MAUREEN Robertson said her ovarian cancer symptoms “fell on deaf ears” when she first visited her GP in
October 2015.
Mrs Robertson, 65, from Auchterarder, had been experiencing persistent bloating, fullness and abdominal pain for weeks when she sought medical advice.
As a post-menopausal woman, aged over 50, with no history of IBS it should have rung alarm bells; instead, she was sent away with pills for stomach cramps.
When she returned four weeks later, she asked to see a different GP who recognised the warning signs and requested a CA125 blood test and ultrasound.
Just two days before Christmas 2015, Mrs Robertson was told her CA125 was “off the scale” at 3,000 – well above a normal 35 reading.
The following January, the mother-oftwo and grandmother, who ran a B&B in Aberdeenshire before moving to Auchterarder after her husband retired, was told that the ultrasound confirmed she had Stage 3 ovarian cancer.
She underwent a hysterectomy and also lost her bowel after the surgeon noticed “spotting”, indicating that the cancer was taking hold there too.
Chemotherapy had to be cut short as previous treatment for breast cancer, which she had survived after discovering a lump aged 50, had left her with myeloid dysplasia – a condition which prevents the blood count recovering.
Mrs Robertson spent nearly a year on the hormone therapy, tamoxifen, but was switched to letrozole after her CA125 count started to climb again.
She said: “We hope that it will keep my markers down but, to be honest, the oncologist hasn’t given me a lot of hope.
“What still sticks in my throat is that for the sake of a blood test, maybe I wouldn’t have been Stage 3 and I might have still had my bowel.
“I was speaking to someone very close to me recently who is a GP, and she’d had a call from a gynaecological consultant telling her off for sending a patient for the scan.
“When you hear things like that, that’s worrying. Is that cost? Is that what it’s about?”
Mrs Robertson said that, until she first fell ill 15 years ago, there had been no history of either breast or ovarian cancer in her family, though one aunt had succumbed to bladder cancer. She said that her own experience has left her determined to raise awareness of ovarian cancer among women, especially around the IBS-like symptoms and the mistaken belief that a cervical smear test can detect the disease.
She added that it is also a particularly isolating illness compared with breast cancer, which affects more than eight times as many women in Scotland.
“It’s extremely lonely – it’s hard to meet anyone else who has it,” she said.
“Having been through breast cancer and now going through ovarian cancer, it’s night and day. It is really the poor sister of cancers in women.
“If you get breast cancer, you’ll get well looked after. Ovarian, no. The support is not there. You have to search for everything, you have to fight for everything.
“We’re losing women that we shouldn’t be losing. I lost a friend a few months ago in her mid-50s – her own business, everything to live for. That shouldn’t be happening.”