Newnan mother battles breast, ovarian cancer

For more than 20 years, Dr. Frank Powell has been surgically removing breast cancer in women. But in all that time, he has seen only two stricken with both breast and ovarian cancer even though neither of them carried a mutation in the BRCA1 gene that increases women’s risk for the diseases.

Forty-three-year-old Chye Upshaw of Newnan is one of them.

Some 22,000 women are diagnosed each year with ovarian cancer in this country. About 15 percent of them have the BRCA1 gene mutation, but it wasn’t until actress Angelina Jolie Pitt announced her decision to have a double mastectomy after testing for the gene that it became part of our public consciousness. She decid- ed to get tested because her mother died of ovarian cancer at age 56.

The actress’s announcement, widely dubbed the “Angelina effect,” spawned a surge in requests for genetic testing nationwide. BRCA testing rates, according to results of a review of a large U.S. health insurer, jumped nearly 40 percent in the month after her 2013 announcement to remove her breasts and remained elevated for at least the following year. Two years later in March, doctors re- moved her ovaries and fallopian tubes.

Upshaw got the first in a series of cancer diagnoses threatening her life in 2012.

Nearly 22,000 women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year; 14,000 die.

That’s more than half and so you can see why many of these women might feel like ticking time bombs.

There was no reason to believe, really, that Upshaw had breast cancer. She was