MORGANTOWN — Jayne Stewart saw it every time she looked in the mirror.
Her cheekbones were hollow, and her collarbones were going sharp. She was taking on a sunken-eyed cast.
For 30 years, Stewart had ridden the airwaves in a successful career as an account executive for a local television station.
She was an already slender woman who stayed that way in a high-energy job, only now she was inexplicably losing weight. Fast, and alarmingly so.
As for the energy that made her famous, forget it. Fatigue wrapped her like a shroud. She was tired, dropping pounds and yet still had a bloated pouch of a belly that shouldn’t have been there.
Stewart made an appointment with a gynecologist — who promptly misdiagnosed her.
She was dying and didn’t know it, and by the time she made it to Mon Health Medical Center in February 2014, the second opinion hit like a TV screen gone black where a commercial was supposed to be.
Ovarian cancer. Stage 3.
Stewart was assigned to Dr. William McBee, a gynecologic oncologist and surgeon at Mon Health. Both chuckle these days when they remember the all-encompassing brevity of their first conversation:
“Am I gonna die?”
“Nope. Not today.”
‘Think of me like your mother’
Around 20,000 women a year are diagnosed with ovarian cancer, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Nearly 14,000 women died from the disease in 2015, the most recent year for full data available to the CDC.
In West Virginia that year, the CDC reported, 160 women were handed the diagnosis.
McBee knew that Stewart’s type of cancer is most treatable in its early stages, but this was Stage 3. The worst is Stage 4, which almost always ends in death.
“I knew we were going to have to be aggressive,” he said, at the hospital last week, while Stewart, who has been in remission for five years, looked on.
That meant major surgery, as her cancer had spread. The woman who once sold airtime wasn’t shy about broadcasting her intentions.
Stewart shook her head and smiled.
“He might not remember it, but I do,” she said. “Before I went into surgery, I told him, ‘I want you to think of me like your mother. Everything you would do to save her, I want you to do to me.’ ”
Some seven hours later, the healing, and all the dogged pragmatism of post-cancer surgery that goes with it, commenced, as Stewart recalled.
“I asked him, ‘Did you get it all?’ and he said, ‘Everything I could see.’ ”
What followed, as McBee said, was an aggressive regimen of chemotherapy and other cancer-fighting drugs. Cancer treatment can be just as tough as cancer roiling unchecked.
Stewart’s weight plummeted to 88 pounds. She endured eight blood transfusions, along with an aneurysm in her stomach and a blood clot in her lung.
And there was still that mirror.
“Your hair falls out. You lose your eyelashes, and you don’t even recognize yourself. And all this time, you’re asking yourself, ‘Am I even going to make it?’ ”
Her surgeon prescribed his personal cell phone number.
“I’d call her, and she’d call me,” he said.
‘You can’t let fear guide anyone’s care’
Last week at Mon Health, the patient and physician shared a hug like the soldiers in the fight against the dreaded disease that they are.
Stewart, as said, has been in remission since that surgery. She gained back her weight and her passport has gotten plumper, too.
She and her husband made a few sojourns to Europe, seeing all the places they never thought they’d get to see.
The cancer survivor attributes that to the skill and compassion of her surgeon and staff at Mon Health.
“We’re a team here,” McBee said.
One of those team members, nurse practitioner Jessica Pforr, said the word, “hope,” has broad shoulders for cancer patients in recovery at Mon Health.
“You can’t let negativity or fear guide anyone’s care,” she said. “If they don’t have hope, you have to give it to them.”
‘Not this cancer’
Both Stewart and McBee said regular appointments with your physician and gynecologist are critical.
Ovarian cancer is insidiously sneaky, Stewart said. It’s been known to come back after years.
While genetic testing is one more layer, there still isn’t a definitive screen for the disease, McBee said.
In the meantime, Stewart said, there are more planes to board and more life to live. She celebrates every day, she said, even as she’s digging in her heels.
Now, when she looks in the mirror, she sees someone who’s stubborn and happy at the same time.
“Something’s going to kill me,” she said.
“But it’s not this cancer.”
Twitter @DominionPostWV
JBissett@DominionPost.com
