Refinery 29 UK
What It’s Like To Have Ovarian Cancer In Your 20s
Seren was about to embark on her second term at Salford University when she realised something was wrong. As a hard partying student, she put it down to the fact she’d been going out too much and was probably run down. Having always been health-conscious, Seren improved her diet and hit the gym, determined to make herself feel better and nip whatever this was in the bud. But it didn’t seem to help, “I was putting on weight and constantly bloated,” she says when we speak on the phone. “I’d also been almost consistently on my period for three months, which was really strange.” Two months later, with little sign of improvement, Seren went to see her doctor at home in north Wales, and after convincing him that her discomfort was not being caused by a food intolerance, he took a blood test. She was back at university when he called to tell her to go to A&E immediately and that her CA125 levels were really high. “I didn’t have a clue what that meant but I just wrote it down and went to hospital. When I handed the post-it note to the nurse she looked really scared. I didn’t know what was going on.” Seren was kept in hospital for three weeks. By the time she was discharged she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and had had major surgery to remove her left fallopian tube and an ovary. Ovarian cancer is often referred to as the “silent killer” but this is an unhelpful and inaccurate term….
