Montreal cancer patients, survivors take part in ovarian cancer fundraiser
Posted October 16, 2022 3:30 pm.
Last Updated October 19, 2022 10:25 am.
Cancer patients, survivors, health-care workers, friends and family gathered in TMR Sunday for the seventh annual Cedars Run for Ovarian Cancer.
Participants walked and ran – on a sunny and mild fall day in Montreal – to help in the fight against ovarian cancer.
They raised $120,000 for the Dagenais Joly-Smith fund. All proceeds went to the DOvEEgene Project, which does screening of ovarian and endometrial cancers.
The walk’s founder – cancer survivor Dominique Dagenais – was on hand for the event.
In 2015, Dagenais was diagnosed with stage-three ovarian cancer. She was caught off guard like many other women.
“There’s practically no signs,” said Dagenais, who was incredibly active prior to her diagnosis. “So my sign was inguinal hernia to bumps, and that’s it. And it didn’t hurt.
“Check your body. It’s an easy thing to do. I mean, I knew I had this, but I figured it’s going to go away. That’s me. It’s my mentality. But it didn’t.”
She underwent countless treatments, a total hysterectomy and weekly rounds of chemotherapy. She eventually beat the cancer.
#WATCH: The 7th Annual Cedars Run for Ovarian Cancer is taking place in Town of Mount-Royal on Sunday. The event, raising funds for The DOvEEgene Project, a genomic pap test meant to catch ovarian cancer in the early stages. Current screening only catches it in stage 3 or 4. pic.twitter.com/nD4GTTt7z8
— CityNews Montreal (@CityNewsMTL) October 16, 2022
More than 3,000 women were diagnosed with ovarian cancer in Canada in 2020.
The current transvaginal ultrasound scan will only pick up the cancer when it is already in stage 3 and 4.
Dr. Lucy Gilbert made it her mission to change that.
New genomic pap test
“We have come up with a pap test, a genomic pap test, that picks it up before it shows up on an ultrasound or anything, all on a blood test,” said Gilbert, the director of gynecologic oncology and women’s health research unit at the MUHC. “It picks up uterine cancers, ovarian cancers, the vicious type. It picks it up very, very early, almost in its pre-cancerous phase.”
The DOvEEgene pap test is more than halfway done with clinical trials. Gilbert says it will take a lot of money to make it accessible to all women for free.
Symptomatic or not, women can access the DOvEEgene test despite a high number of participants. It is encouraged for those over the age of 45.
“One thing is for women to listen to their bodies,” said Joelle Malek, the nurse manager of the DOvEEgene project. “Because most of the time women would say, ‘oh I had these symptoms, but I thought it was menopause. It was age.’ So women didn’t really listen to their bodies. And most of the time, women, they don’t think about themselves. They want to think about their families, work. They don’t really take themselves as in charge and look for help or reach for help.”
Ovarian cancer is often known as the ‘silent killer.’
“And the reason for that is it starts in the fallopian tube and drops like icing sugar throughout the abdomen before you can even see a tiny speck on an ultrasound or see in the blood in a tumor marker,” said Gilbert. “That’s why early detection is the key.”
