Surviving and Thriving

In 1999, when Janice was diagnosed and treated for stage 3 ovarian cancer at a community hospital, her doctor didn’t give her much hope. Janice, 38, had three young children: a 12-year-old daughter and 10-year-old twins. She worried that she would not see them grow up, and that led her to seek a second opinion at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.

“Don’t tell me how bad it is. I’ve heard all of that,” Janice told Kimmel Cancer ovarian cancer expert and surgeon Robert Bristow. “Just tell me what you are going to do to fix it.”

Bristow and colleague Deborah Armstrong, a medical oncologist and ovarian cancer expert, had no intentions of giving up.

He removed a new ovarian tumor detected on imaging, and referred Janice to Armstrong for treatment with a promising new cancer drug called Taxol.

Taxol was one of the great research discoveries in ovarian cancer in the mid 1980s. It was Kimmel Cancer Center researchers who developed delivery methods that allowed the drug to be tolerated by patients. After a series of clinical trials, it was hailed as the most promising new cancer agent in more than a decade. It is now part of standard therapy for ovarian cancer and other gynecological cancers.

Janice received the drug in 1999 and again in 2001 when her cancer came back. In addition to Taxol, she benefited from a half-century-old method for delivering chemotherapy directly into the abdomen. A seven-year study of more than 400 women, led by Armstrong and reported on in the New England Journal of Medicine, found increased survival rates in women with advanced ovarian cancer, which resulted in renewed interest in the abandoned method.

“This method appears to be better at destroying lingering cancer cells,” said Armstrong. The findings led to a new recommendation in 2006 by the gynecology oncology group, making the treatment, known as intraperitoneal therapy, standard of care for many women with ovarian cancer.

After three ovarian cancer recurrences, four surgeries and nine years of treatment with Taxol, cisplatin and other drug therapies, Janice has been cancer-free since 2008. Now 62, she is grateful for the science and doctors who saved her life, and she does her part to pay it forward.

She volunteers for Survivors Teaching Students at Johns Hopkins, a program in which cancer survivors speak to third-year medical students to help them better understand the experience of patients with cancer and to prepare them to be better-informed and compassionate doctors. She also participates in the Woman to Woman mentoring program, sharing her experience in navigating ovarian cancer with newly diagnosed women.

She recently was invited to attend the annual conference of the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition, which supports survivors and caregivers and funds ovarian cancer research. Janice had the distinction of being the longest survivor of ovarian cancer there.

She attributes her survival to her Kimmel Cancer Center doctors and the research that led to new treatments.

Janice, who worried in 1999 that she might not live to see her children grow up, has celebrated many milestones with them — high school and college graduations, weddings and the births of five grandchildren. 

“Knowing there are doctors always looking for new and better cancer drugs gives patients like me such hope,” says Janice. “They never gave up on me, and I’m alive because of that. It’s the greatest gift.”