For ovarian cancer awareness month in March, Ovacome, the UK charity for the disease, are urging mothers to tell their daughters about the tell-tale symptoms of Ovarian Cancer which are:
Bloating;
Eating less (no appetite);
Abdominal pain;
Talk to your GP!
It is, I feel, wrongly referred to here as the 'silent disease': in the USA it is called the 'whispering disease' and this I think is far more accurate.
Here is a poem, which is my way of telling:
Daughters, I need to tell you
about pain
each time I bent over,
about being
so breathless
I felt my
lungs were leaving my chest.
About my
stomach
huge as a full-term
pregnancy.
About my
surgeon’s eyes above his mask,
the brilliant
blue of them.
About pressing
the button
on the morphine
pump –what you thought
was ‘courage/cheerfulness’
was simply
outright stoned.
About the
nights my body was so full
of knives I
couldn’t sleep
and when
death came in to tempt me
I almost
welcomed it.
About the utter
focus of my fight to live.
Daughters, I
need to tell you this,
because I
want it never to happen
to either
of you.
Gill McEvoy
