Janet: A Survivor's Journey Written by Administrator    Friday, 27 March 2009 17:35 On May 5, 2002, my 56-year-old sister learned that she had ovarian cancer. It was stage 3C. I spent that summer with her in Pensacola while she went through the initial rounds of chemotherapy. I returned to Memphis in the fall to begin a new semester of teaching at the law school. I also made an appointment with my dermatologist because of a rash that developed in my navel where I had been using Neosporin to treat what I thought was some type of cyst or abscess. The dermatologist told me that I should have the “cyst or abscess” removed by surgeon and biopsied, but I was told not to worry, that it was not a “Sister Mary Joseph's nodule,” which is evidence of stage 4 ovarian cancer. She even showed me a picture of a Sister Mary Joseph's nodule, and it looked much worse than the small abscess on my navel. My next appointment was a consult with a gastroenterologist who had done my baseline colonoscopy several years earlier. Last Updated ( Friday, 27 March 2009 17:45 ) Read more...