Ovarian Cancer Teaches Hard Life Lessons

Kelly Irvin was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer in January 2016. Catch up on all of Kelly's blogs here!

As I enter my ninth year of continuous treatment for stage 4 ovarian cancer, I find myself reflecting on what I have learned about myself and how it has changed the way that I face life’s challenges. It’s taken almost all of those nine years for me to learn the hardest lesson: it does no good to dwell on what cancer has taken from me. Rather, for my sake and the sake of my loved ones, I have to focus what it has given me.

I still have bouts of sadness over what the disease took from me. It landed a double whammy sucker punch by taking not only my health, but my mobility. After two years of painful false starts, a neurologist finally diagnosed my inability to walk normally as paraneoplastic syndrome. In layman’s terms, that means my immune system went crazy trying to fight the cancer and attacked my central nervous system.

For a person who loved to hike; do aerobic exercises with Billy Blanks, Gilead, Denise Austin and Jane Fonda every day (I know that shows my age); zipline; play in the ocean and walk in my neighborhood every day, this was cataclysmic. Maybe worse than the cancer itself.

However, this journey has taught me — finally — to stop focusing on what I can’t do and focus on what I can do. I can work out doing aerobic chair exercises on YouTube every day with Paul Eugene, a great-grandfather who is older than I am, enthusiastic, full of energy and with his “woo-hoos,” I can’t help but smile. I can spend 30 minutes on the stationary bike every day. Exercise makes me feel better now, just as it did before, even if the form is different.

I can’t carry my two-year-old grandson around on my hip and run after him in a game of hide-and-seek, but I can give him rides on my rollator, play “vrrrom-vrrrom” with his cars, go with him to story hour at the library and share a bowl of his favorite mandarin oranges with him.

I can’t pitch baseballs, swing, play badminton or jump on the trampoline with my older grandkids. Despite this, cancer doesn’t keep me from attending my granddaughter’s dance recitals or grandsons’ baseball games. It doesn’t keep me from reading to them or buying them books or watching Christmas movies with them or playing uno, go fish and a dozen other games that the five-year-old loves.

I know this isn’t how my husband intended for us to spend his retirement years. I always imagined we would travel to faraway places. I had a huge bucket list. Now, that list is much simpler and easier. But cancer doesn’t keep us from enjoying the wonderful meals he cooks, the sourdough bread he makes or from binge watching our favorite television shows together. It doesn’t keep us from watching the birds on the feeders that he fills in both the front and backyard. Or delighting in the violets, amaryllis and Christmas cactus — and many other plants — blooming and growing in the kitchen bay window and on the deck thanks to his green thumb. What it does is make me appreciate these simple pleasures more.

Cancer also gave me the gift of leaving my day job to write full-time. As a result, I’ve spent the last nine years writing more than 20 books and a dozen novellas. It allowed me to fulfill a life-long dream of being a published author. Sure, it might have happened in another way, but this way allowed me to incorporate my struggles with my faith, learning patience, learning to trust God and learning what’s important, into my writing. It even served as research for a novel that explores all these issues through the eyes of an oncologist when her sister is diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

Cancer gave me the gift of seeing time as an incredibly valuable commodity. Having a life-threatening disease reminds me daily to make the most of whatever time I have. So many folks go through life assuming they have tomorrow or next week or next year to take that bucket-list trip, to write that book, to learn that language, to make amends, to say, “I love you.” I wake up every day knowing my time will be shorter than I expected or wanted. The same is true for everyone — they just rarely seem to realize it.

So, I ask myself at the end of each day, did I do something worth doing today? Did I use my time well? I don’t think I’ll ever be able to say, “I’m thankful for having learned these lessons,”—not this way. It still feels like a terrible hard truth most days. But at least I know what the important questions are. It seems to me they are questions we should all be asking ourselves.

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