Calling Out a Silent Killer

Peggy Jennings was spending too many hours at work and too few on herself when she began to notice that her body wasn’t bouncing back from exertion the way it once did. She was tired all the time. Then she came down with pneumonia. Then she noticed her pants weren’t fitting right. But her symptoms seemed so familiar, so commonly lamented by the over-forty set, she was fairly sure she could diagnose the trouble on her own.

“Middle age is pigeon poop,” the then-fifty-six-year-old decided.

But when her annual Pap smear turned up “atypical glandular cells of undetermined significance,” it became clear her condition was more complicated than that. Still, a subsequent transvaginal ultrasound, uterine biopsy, and hysterectomy revealed no sign of cancer. Jennings and her husband were relieved.

Then, five days later, the phone rang—and this time the news was not so good. A consummate list-maker as a member of Gabberts’ marketing team, Jennings picked up a pencil and jotted down the words that would change her life: pelvic washings, peritoneal cancer, chemotherapy, Taxol, Carboplatin.

“We were standing in the kitchen, and my husband read the list over my shoulder and turned as gray as these walls,” Jennings tells a small gathering on the twelfth floor of the Malcom Moos Health Sciences Tower at the University of Minnesota. “Absorbing the news of a cancer diagnosis is surreal. All the fears of a lifetime come to rest.”

As she tells her story, heads nod sympathetically—though Jennings is not here to curry support. She is one of a formidable group of cancer survivors who intend to leave a permanent impression on the hearts and minds of third- and fourth-year medical students at the U of M. She belongs to the Minnesota Ovarian Cancer Alliance, whose members, every six weeks, share their stories with a fresh crop of residents beginning a rotation in obstetrics and gynecology. By speaking out in this venue, MOCA members hope to put a face on a disease that’s usually not diagnosed until its advanced stages, when a patient’s chances of survival are slim.

The alliance includes women such as Jennings, who has three grown children and no family history of gynecologic cancers or obvious risk factors; Ellen Kleinbaum, whose sixteen-year survival after being diagnosed is, she tells the ob-gyn residents, “nothing short of a miracle”; Sarah Noonan, a member of the organization’s Young Survivors’ Network who was diagnosed at thirty-one after going to her doctor with fertility concerns; and Lorraine “Raine” Snyder, who, after four and a half years of misdiagnoses, was so intent on getting her message to the next generation of physicians she dragged her oxygen tank to a survivor training session just days before she died last May.

“My hope,” Jennings says to the medical students, “is that if someday you have a woman in your office who comes to you with symptoms like ours, I want you to think of us.”