Four years ago, when Vicki Campana was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she refused to let her disease conquer her. "I was going to fight," she says.
Campana had an army of supporters by her side through that fightincluding her family, friends, and co-workers. She quickly realized how important it was to lean on the people who had her back. "When you are diagnosed, you need to embrace your tribe. You need to embrace the people that are stepping up."
Read MorePowering Through Treatment
Chemotherapy treatment isn't easy. The strong medicines needed to stop the cancer can also cause side effects like fatigue and nausea. But despite the rigors of her treatment, Campana made the decision to keep working. "I was trying to just dig deep and power through and keep moving forward," she says. Some side effects, like hair loss, took effort to conceal. "I would wear wigs, and hats, and wraps into the office, and some people actually didn't know that I was in treatment." Those who did notice figured she was just starting a new fashion trend, she says.Hoping for a Future Pregnancy
Surgery is another essential part of ovarian cancer treatment. Doctors try to remove as much of the cancer as possible, which usually involves taking out both ovaries, as well as the fallopian tubes, and any other organs in the abdomen where the cancer may have spread.
Once the ovaries are removed, it isn’t possible to get pregnant. But if the cancer is only in one ovary, sometimes fertility-sparing surgery can preserve the other one, which is what Campana chose to do. "We removed my right ovary, which had the tumor," she says. "I kept the other ovary in the hopes that we would be able to get pregnant after chemo."
But later, genetic tests revealed she had a mutation in the ATM gene. Women with this gene mutation are at higher risk for breast cancer in the future, which led Campana to make a difficult choice. "I decided to remove my other ovary," she says. "When you do that, you go into menopause."
Sudden Menopause
Typically, menopause happens gradually, over a period of about a year. But when the ovaries are removed during surgery, the loss of estrogen leads to a quick switch to menopause. Campana was only 40 years old, and the rapid transition came as a shock.
"It's very difficult to be so young and have to deal with hot flashes in the middle of the night," she says. "My husband will look at me all the time and be like, 'Are you having a hot flash?' because I'll start to get really pink or warm. Or I'll look at him and be like, 'Is it warm in here?' 'No, it's not warm in here, it's just you.'”
Two years later, the hot flashes and other menopause symptoms have lessened. "With time it does get easier," she says. "They're not as drastic. They're not as often as they were anymore."
Family First
Two years ago, Campana and her husband made another life-changing decision. They moved back to Cleveland to be closer to their three nieces. "Being an aunt, and for my husband, being an uncle is the closest thing at this point that we have to having our own children," she says. "It's very important to me to make sure that we are around them, and we're involved in the activities that they do."
Going through treatment for ovarian cancer reinforced the importance of having family close by. It also revealed Campana's inner strength, and her ability to persevere in the face of enormous challenges.
"When it comes to cancer, you're being challenged with that diagnosis. You're having to go through that treatment. You're having to make decisions quickly and rapidly. You're surviving through all of that every day." she says. "I survived cancer. It did not beat me. I was able to beat it."
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