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How important are my -- or your -- ovaries?
Recent research reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association last week indicates that women with a BRCA gene mutation who have their ovaries removed have a significantly decreased risk of contracting and dying from ovarian and breast cancers. These woman are also reported to live longer overall than women who opt not to have the surgery. The same findings hold true for women with this gene mutation who elect to have mastectomies.
Dry statistics, each percentage point representing a woman with an intense personal choice to make with countless variables factoring into it. What do you do with this kind of information that wasn't readily available even a generation ago? How do you weigh the possible, the probable, the "this might happen," even? What tips the balance towards having invasive surgery to have body parts removed, or to leave what might not be well enough alone?
Surely you have to think about it long and hard, and like anything else, listen carefully to trusted medical professionals about the risks and benefits. You need to talk to your partner if you have one, to your friends and your family. You need to talk to other women, ideally those who have made similar choices.
I've been thinking about what I'd do if I turned out to have this mutation. I've lived for forty years without having children. My chances of bearing a child in the next four years -- my personal cutoff date -- are slim. So if, within that time, I learned that I'd have a better chance of living a normal, cancer-free lifespan without my internal reproductive organs?
Take my ovaries, please.
Really. Take them. I have no idea if I can get pregnant, or if the reasonable opportunity to responsibly bear a child from this body will occur in the next few years. My feelings about this notwithstanding, my brain knows full well that that ship may well have sailed.
But regardless? I love my life. I love being with my family and my friends. I love the places I go and the experiences I have, and -- for the most part -- the work that I do. And I know full well that producing a child from this body is not by any means the only way to become a parent -- something which seems to warrant mentioning, even though it has nothing to do with my ovaries.
The thing is, I don't want to die yet, and I'd like to reduce my chances of getting cancer. My ovaries? Not essential to my daily survival, like my liver or my spleen. And in this case, the risk of contracting cancer -- coming as I do from a family that seems to specialize in the trickiest of organ cancers -- is something I'd like to reduce. If I found out with some certainty that my risk was much higher than average? I would indeed be willing to consider organ removal.
I would need to be fully versed in the facts, though. What about false positives? What are those dry percentages -- the likelihood that I would get cancer with this gene mutation? Is it 30 percent or 75? Because if it's the latter, where are my hospital admission papers? The former? Maybe I could wait awhile. And still, the averages might not apply to me. We've all seen the rules and the crazy exceptions -- the chain smoker who lives to be 92, the non-drinking, non-smoking young person cruelly dead of lung cancer.
And all of this assumes that I'd have the access and the desire to have genetic testing in the first place to find out if my BRCA gene is mutated.
Life is frightening and random. The more we know, the more complicated it can be -- and the longer our list of educated guesses. But looking at it from a more positive standpoint, the more educated we can be as well -- and the better choices we can hopefully make for ourselves and the people who share our lives.
I admit that I would feel differently if it were my breasts, yes. I wear my ovaries -- as equally liable as they are to become cancerous and kill me younger than I'd like to go, thanks -- on the inside. The question of taking my breasts is way more loaded, more intrinsic to how I see myself as I walk through the world, how I feel as a
