7 Annual Report 2021 Support research organisations like OCRF and let’s turn this around and make sure that all the little girls born today learn about ovarian cancer in history class, and not from their doctor 50 years from now. Personal reflection on an ovarian cancer diagnosis Associate Professor Siobhan O’Sullivan is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at UNSW Sydney. She is the author of Animals, Equality and Democracy and a proud OCRF Ambassador. I hadn’t given ovarian cancer any thought until the day I was diagnosed with it. It has become cliché to point out what a strange year 2020 was. On 3 August, for me, it verged on the surreal. That morning I went to my GP with a generalised feeling of being unwell. I was not in pain. All I could say was that something didn’t feel right, and my abdomen was bloated. That afternoon my doctor phoned. My blood results showed something seriously wrong. He told me to go to hospital. I now know that my so-called “CA125” blood marker, which should sit below 25, was elevated to around the 470. I had Stage III ovarian cancer. I found out because I went to the doctor complaining of feeling “yuck”. Thank goodness I did. It fell to an emergency room doctor to deliver the news. He opened with, “When I tell you this your life will change forever.” What he did not take into account was the fact that, though the word “cancer” is always distressing, I knew so little about ovarian cancer that I was unable to immediately grasp the seriousness of my situation. (an excerpt from an article printed in ABC Religion and Ethics, Opinion, on 15 February 2021). Our Challenges