Bev Lipsitz

March 2013

This story starts in 1986. I was thirty-five years old. I had started having painful bowel movements, and so I went to my primary care physician thinking I had some kind of obstruction. She did a rectal exam and didn’t feel much of anything, and neither did I. Then she started to do a pelvic and I practically hit the ceiling, it was so painful. A transvaginal ultrasound showed a mass and I was referred to a gynecologist who performed an urgent laparoscopy. I didn’t understand the urgency at the time but in retrospect I realize she was in a hurry to make sure it wasn’t cancer. It wasn’t, not that time.

The surgeon removed a fluid-filled cyst, about the size and shape of a bunch of grapes, from the cul-de-sac behind my uterus. The pathology report said it was benign, that there was no known cause for this particular type of cyst, and that it was fairly likely to recur.

And about ten years later, it did recur. Same symptoms, same surgery, same kind of cyst, same pathology. No cancer, nothing to worry about.

Then in early 2008 I started to have some mild abdominal discomfort. I was having a lot of acid reflux. I was treated for diverticulitis and we doubled my dose of acid blockers to try to relieve the reflux. I felt better for a few months but then began to have painful bowel movements, just like when I had the previous two cysts, years earlier. As before, we did a transvaginal ultrasound and it showed a mass, but there was no reason to think anything was different this time, so there was no sense of urgency.

After continuing and growing pain, I eventually had a laparoscopy. The assumption was still that I had the same kind of benign cyst I had years before. It never even occurred to me that I might have cancer; I was just desperate for the pain to stop. When I woke up in the recovery room, the gynecologist was in tears. She said that when she started to open me up, she found that there was cancer all over the place. So she took some tissue for a biopsy, closed me back up, and referred me to a gynecologic oncologist. He performed a hysterectomy and debulking surgery on Dec 1st 2008. By that time, there was widespread cancer in the peritoneum as well as a tumor outside of the peritoneum; hence I was diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer.

I finished chemo in April 2009 after which I had about two years of relatively good health. For the last several months of that interval, we knew that the cancer was coming back, based on blood-work and imaging, although I still felt great. I knew I cared more about quality of life than length of life, and I was determined to delay starting chemo for as long as I could — until I absolutely had to. It was hard to know when that would be. I discussed it with my gynecologic oncologist every time I saw him. Finally in May 2011, it was clear that I could not delay any longer. I was uncomfortable, fatigued, bloated, unable to eat much, and starting to lose weight. Scans showed that a tumor in the folds of my small intestine had doubled in size, and there was other new tumor growth and lymph node enlargement.

At this point it didn’t seem like chemo was going to compromise my quality of life any more than the recurrence of my cancer; so my doctor and I decided it was time to start a second round of chemo. I finished a little over a year ago. My CA-125 had dropped to 8 and scans showed that everything had resolved except for that one pesky tumor on the small intestine, which finally did shrink back down to a few millimeters. All this was very good news, but I knew it would only be a matter of time before things developed again, and that this interval would most likely be shorter than the previous one. When I went in for my routine 3-month blood-draw and checkup in August 2012, my CA-125 was up. Still, I wasn’t willing to let chemo make me sick before the cancer did.

More recently, my symptoms were worsening: more frequent and more severe abdominal twinges, considerable discomfort after eating, and increasing fatigue.

I went in for another routine checkup a couple of months ago, and my CA-125 was up from 45 to 131. I knew that if I didn’t start treatment, I was just going to continue to get more uncomfortable, so I decided that it was time.

I had three treatments of Doxil, but following some adverse side-effects, my doctor and I decided that I should begin Topotecan instead. Meanwhile, I’m feeling good enough to squeeze lots of travel in between treatments, and most importantly, I’m enjoying life while I can, and taking each step as it comes.

NOTE: Bev has traveled extensively over the last couple of years. She’s taken small-ship, nature cruises to Baja California, the Galapagos Islands and Arctic Svalbard (above Norway); three photography workshops in central Mexico, Big Sur, and Molokai; cancer retreats in Montana and West Virginia; family trips to Pittsburgh and Austin; a week with friends on Kauai; and a Caribbean cruise with a group of friends where they snorkeled in Cozumel, Roatan, and Grand Cayman.

On a personal note, Bev has been with her partner, Roz, for thirty-five years. They live with Scooby, their sweet fifteen year-old Dachshund. Together, they raised a son who now lives in Portland with his wife and stepson. The year Bev was diagnosed, she retired from Portland State University where she worked in Admissions and Registration as the coordinator of the student database and as the liaison to the IT department. She loves doing photography and researching her family history.

To see more of Bev’s photos, go to: www.aracnet.com/~lipsitzb or lipsitzb.smugmug.com