Those left behind

New Zealand women are more likely to die from ovarian cancer than those in comparable countries, which diagnose the disease earlier and offer free access to more drugs.

- SARAH CATHERALL

Kim Lannon thought she was burnt out. It was the end of 2021, and the assistant principal of a central North Island primary school felt sick in the mornings. She had led teachers and pupils through a year of Covid disruptions and was losing weight. She often felt as though she might throw up.

Three months before, she had gone to her GP with abdominal pain, which was diagnosed as indigestion. When the then53-year-old needed to sit down to rest, a relieving teacher raised the alarm. Lannon recalls, "The teacher said, "This is so abnormal. Have you seen a doctor?"

"I was so tired. I couldn't stand up when I was cooking dinner. I went to the doctor and she touched my pelvic area and it felt like I had hit the roof."

Two months later, tests confirmed she had ovarian cancer - aggressive and stage 4, it had metastasised and she has no chance of surviving it. Two years on, 56-year-old Lannon no longer works, has paid for some drugs that aren't publicly funded, and is on a treatment plan. But near the end of July she was told she had very little time left.

Before her diagnosis, Lannon had never heard of ovarian cancer. Breast cancer is a mainly female cancer that is widely known, but ovarian cancer has symptoms that are often undiagnosed and there is no screening programme for it. In New Zealand, ovarian cancer is the most deadly form of gynaecological cancer. Every day, one woman is diagnosed with ovarian cancer; each week, five women die of it - that's about 260 women dying annually, often young and often living shorter lives than if they'd been diagnosed in Australia, Scandinavia or England.

Our survival rates are low compared with other countries against which we benchmark ourselves, such as Norway, Denmark, the UK and Australia. Oncologists point to survival rates across the Tasman, where half of all the women diagnosed live beyond five years. Here, only a third makes that distance.