A breast cancer operation led to the discovery of ovarian cancer

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

(HealthDay News) -- Cancer has stalked Donna Lackey all her life.

Her grandmother and mother died from breast cancer, both of them at the age of 47.

Lackey, now 41 and living in the Dallas , Texas , suburb of South Lake , said she always wondered if it was something that ran in her family, something she'd one day have to deal with.

In her mid-30s, when her cousin on her mother's side was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 35, Lackey decided to stop wondering.

Her cousin went through genetic testing and learned that she carried a gene that increased cancer risk in women.

"Since she was positive, I had a 50-50 chance of carrying this gene," Lackey said. "If you have this gene, you have an 87 percent chance of getting breast cancer and a 47 percent chance of getting ovarian cancer."

Lackey decided to have her own genetic testing done and end the speculation. She and her brothers provided genetic material, and a few months later she learned that she did indeed have the gene.

"Right then and there, I asked the doctor, 'What do I need to do to prevent this? I'm not going to let cancer get me like it got my mom and grandmom.' I wanted to attack it before it attacked me," Lackey recalled.

Doctors said she could have a double mastectomy and a complete hysterectomy if she wanted to ward off cancer. Lackey agreed, and asked them to also perform reconstructive surgery on her breasts in the same operation.

Her cancer-preventing surgery took place on Nov. 6, 2002. She had a husband and two children, 8 and 10 at the time. "I was just determined, I was not going to let it get me," she said.

When she woke up, she found it already had.

While opening her up for her hysterectomy, surgeons found unusual fluid in her abdominal area.

"Lo and behold, I had stage IIIC ovarian cancer," Lackey said. "It had spread to both ovaries and had gone into my lymph nodes. Basically the doc said if six more months had gone by, they would have opened me and closed me, because there wouldn't have been anything they could have done.

She had exhibited none of the symptoms related to ovarian cancer.

"The surgery saved my life. There's no question about that."

Along with everything else, the surgeons also had removed her ovaries, her appendix and several lymph nodes.

Three weeks after her surgery, Lackey began chemotherapy. She signed up for a clinical trial, and received a massive dose of three different chemicals.

"The chemo broke down a lot of my healing process," she said. "I still had open wounds six months after the surgery."

That became the opening salvo in a continuing war with cancer that has stretched over the past six years of her life. Shehas had six recurrences of cancer since.

"I usually have a four- or five-month break and then go back on chemo," she said. "I am now facing another recurrence. This will be my seventh. They found it in lymph nodes high in the abdominal area."

"It's really hard," Lackey added. "At this point, this is part of our life. You have grown to accept that this is a chronic disease and you have to keep it under control. That's what we keep doing. We just fight and battle every day."

In the time since she started fighting, her youngest child grew to 14 years old and her oldest to 16.

"If you think about that, from 10 to 16 is a lifetime in my child's eyes," she said. "You have to fight. You have no choice, when you have kids."

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