If I have been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, what questions should I ask my doctor?

If diagnosed with ovarian cancer, it's important to follow the disease closely because of the high recurrence rate. Audra Moran, CEO of Ovarian Cancer Research Fund, outlines the questions to ask your doctor and a helpful support program.

Transcript

00:00

A lot of women are just worried that they won't be able to return to a normal life after they've had the surgery, after they've had chemotherapy.

00:06

And those are the kinds of questions you'd want to talk about with a doctor. [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:17

First of all, you'd want to see a gynecologic oncologist. So, many people are diagnosed by their gynecologist,

00:23

which is actually not the doctor that you'd want to see. Eventually you'd want a gynecologic oncologist that was a surgeon and that could do the surgery for you.

00:30

So you obviously want to know what your surgery would look like, what your recovery would be, what your treatment course would be beyond that.

00:36

And then you'd want to follow the disease. Because of the high rate of recurrence, you'd want to probably ask questions about,

00:44

what will that look like? Will you be checking my CA125? What's a good number to have? What's a bad number?

00:50

And then in terms of recurrence, if it does recur, you'd obviously want to go in as soon as anything, any indicator started to show that you

00:58

might have had a recurrence. And a lot of women are just worried that they won't be able to return to a normal life after they've had the surgery, after they've had chemotherapy.

01:07

And those are the kinds of questions you'd want to talk about with a doctor. OCRF actually developed a program also called Woman to Woman.

01:14

And it's a program that we're basically giving to the hospitals to help them develop support programs within the gynecologic oncology

01:21

departments. And it pairs women who are post-treatment, two years post-treatment that are better and living their lives, it pairs them as volunteers

01:28

with women who are currently undergoing treatment because women tend to have so many questions. And it's really hard, despite having a doctor and a supportive

01:36

partner, to be able to ask those people, what can I expect from chemotherapy? How am I gonna feel? When am I gonna feel better?

01:43

So we started this program, which has had a really high success rate, in terms of pairing people and letting them just talk to each other,

01:49

because the support program can be really helpful as well. [AUDIO LOGO]