Alisha had already visited the doctor several times complaining of an aching stomach, but they couldn’t tell her what was wrong.
When she realised she’d lost weight, was feeling nauseous and her appetite had dissolved, she went in for another appointment.
“When I noticed those signs, I went back and we did some further tests, and they found stage four ovarian cancer,” she told The Feed.
“I remember waking up the morning after I was told by the GP and I had that kind of weird movie moment where you're like, ‘Did that really happen?’. And like it took me a little while to go, ‘Oh, yeah, no, that that actually happened, you've got cancer,’’” she said.
Ovarian cancer is a in one or both ovaries. It’s a rare gynaecological cancer that normally affects women over the age of 50.
Two-thirds of women with ovarian cancer will not survive five years following diagnosis, according to -- a fundraising organisation for gynaecological cancer research.
The symptoms of ovarian cancer are vague and include things like abdominal pain, fatigue, changes in one’s period and discomfort during sex, so Alisha says, “you can kind of attribute them to other things”.
“Even being a doctor, I didn't know much about ovarian. Other than that, it's associated with a really poor prognosis,” she said.
“So, with me, it was like, the abdominal pain, it must be irritable bowel syndrome from stress, or, you know, maybe it's a previous diagnosis of polycystic ovaries and that's playing up.”
It’s been four years since Alisha was first diagnosed. She’d been working as a doctor and studying to be a psychiatrist, but the cancer meant she had to put everything on hold.
When she was diagnosed, Alisha was asked if she’d like to have her eggs harvested so that she could have children one day.
But realistically, Alisha had no option; the cancer had already travelled throughout her body and she couldn’t afford to delay treatment.
“I had cancer throughout my entire body, I had it in my breasts. It was in my lymph nodes. Later on, we've looked back at the scan, and we realised I actually had like a cancer spot on my heart,” she said.
“I needed to start treatment immediately... so they removed my fallopian tubes.”
While Alisha has a supportive group of friends and family, she says fighting cancer has complicated her love life.
“I’m still trying to navigate, you know, do you tell someone straight away that you have cancer? When's the right time to break it to someone?,” she said.
“Even just recently, I was talking to a guy through a dating app. And then he brought up the question: ‘do you want kids?’. And so obviously, I didn't want to be dishonest. I was like, ‘I can't have kids'. Yeah, so that pretty much ended that.”
September is Gynaecological Cancer Awareness Month and Alisha is advocating for more research and funding for ovarian cancer through WomenCan’s .
Alisha consider herself to be an extremely positive person. Source: Supplied
When Alisha was first diagnosed, she wasn’t able to find anyone else in Townsville who had ovarian cancer. She believes having a community for cancer sufferers is important, particularly when there is such a high rate of recurrence of the disease.
She’s since started her own ‘coffee group’ that’s grown to 10 members after finding others with the disease through Facebook.
“For those who do manage to achieve no evidence of disease, it's this constant fear of it returning,” she said.
“I've got some of my friends in the Townsville cancer group. One lady, she's been disease-free, amazingly, for eight years. And still her mental health with the fear of recurrence, she struggles with it.”
Alisha is now “clear of disease” but says there’s no guarantee that the cancer won’t return.
“I'm naturally a very positive person. I just made a choice that I can either be really upset about it and let it impact me more, or I can choose to be positive and just get on with life and enjoy it,” she said.
“So I kind of have that strong mindset. I will stay positive at any cost.”
