Getting Gynecologic Cancer Despite Actively Maintaining a Healthy Lifestyle

Sometimes despite doing everything you can to prevent gynecological cancer, you will end up getting a cancer or pre-cancer diagnosis.  You may feel yourself getting frustrated or even angry.

Your anger and frustration are completely understandable. You’ve worked so hard to prevent this outcome, and it happened anyway. It’s incredibly unfair. The good news is, though, that your proactive self-care and education have very likely put you in the best position possible to head off a worse diagnosis. And if that diagnosis comes anyway, you’ll still be in a better position to survive the fight than most other women. Because you educated yourself and went in for your regular checkups, your hyperplasia with atypia was caught early, before it could turn into cancer. And the fact that you’ve been eating right and staying healthy in other ways makes you physically more able to keep up the fight than you would have been without taking those proactive steps. What you did was not for nothing.

Continue to be as proactive as you have been as you move forward. Continue exercising to stay as fit as you can in case you need a hysterectomy to deal with your diagnosis and prevent cancer from developing. A physically fit person recovers from surgery more quickly and heals better than a person who is less fit. If cancer runs in your family, seek a second opinion before accepting a treatment plan, and consider being very aggressive in your treatment due to your higher-than-average risk of developing cancer.

Allow yourself to cry and be angry. Throw pillows at the wall and scream at the sky if it makes you feel better. But in the end, redouble your efforts at making healthy choices, knowing that your actions are helping you, even when a bad diagnosis makes it seem like they’re not. It’s not fair, but that doesn’t matter at this point. There’s a fighter in you that took those steps in the first place, and it’s that fighter that will lead you to win the battle in the end.

Browse through the HysterSisters GYN cancer articles for helpful tips, information and encouragement: Ovarian Cancer, Cervical Cancer, Uterine Cancer, Endometrial Cancer, Vaginal Cancer.

This content was written by staff of HysterSisters.com by non-medical professionals based on discussions, resources and input from other patients for the purpose of patient-to-patient support.  Reprinted with permission: Being Proactive Didn’t Help Prevent a Gynecologic (GYN) Cancer Scare!