Athena Porter survived cervical cancer | radical hysterectomy | endocervical adenocarcinoma | HPV+

DESCRIPTION

Athena Porter Description

KEYWORDS WITH SPACES:

cervical cancer, athena porter, endocervical adenocarcinoma, colposcopy, LEEP procedure, radical hysterectomy, pap smear, HPV+

TITLE:

Athena Porter survived cervical cancer | radical hysterectomy | endocervical adenocarcinoma | HPV+

DESCRIPTION:

After close to a decade of abnormal pap smears, a Cone Biopsy indicated Athena Porter had cervical cancer.  To make sure her diagnosis of endocervical adenocarcinoma didn’t spread, she opted for a radical hysterectomy.  With the procedure, her cervix was not the only vital organ removed.  A wife and mother to two daughters, Athena feels blessed that she can return to work on her Iowa farm. 

In 2012, she went in for an annual wellness exam.  A pap smear indicated she was HPV+.  Her doctor told Athena a worst-case scenario was cancer, but the virus would likely go away on its own.  She was asked to return in a year.  When she came back, she was still HPV+,  so she underwent a colposcopy, an attempt to get a better look at cells on her cervix.

This led to a LEEP procedure in which cells on her cervix were removed.  The virus was still there, but the procedure showed clean margins.  After more years of being HPV+, in late 2022, Athena underwent a Cone Biopsy, in which a device resembling an ice cream scoop removed cells on her cervix, cells that were sent to the Mayo Clinic.  In early 2023, results came back.  Athena received a phone call at work telling her she had cervical cancer.

Her doctor said by way of treatment, Athena could have only her cervix removed, but she opted for a radical hysterectomy, which would come close to guaranteeing the cancer wouldn’t spread.  The hysterectomy removed her cervix, her uterus, the top part of her vagina and her fallopian tubes.  This move came after she and her husband decided their family, including two young daughters, was complete, and that they were okay with having no more children.

Athena was in the hospital for four or five days, then after she was discharged, even with medication, she experienced severe pain when she would stretch or twist. 

Athena reached survivorship, and though she would admit her health is not what it was prior to her diagnosis, she feels blessed to be able to return to her office job and work on her Iowa farm.  She also feels blessed that her cancer journey was not as severe as that of others who have also been diagnosed with cervical cancer.

By way of advice, she strongly advises women to get screened for cervical cancer and to get the HPV vaccine.

Additional Resources:

Support Group: Cervivor  https://www.cervivor.org

TRANSCRIPT

Bruce Morton: Greetings.  This is the @CancerInterviews podcast, and I’m your host, prostate cancer survivor Bruce Morton.  Outside of some abnormal pap smear results, our guest on this episode experienced no symptoms and yet a Cone Biopsy confirmed she had endocervical adenocarcinoma, a form of cervical cancer.  However, she underwent a radical hysterectomy and achieved survivorship.  She is Athena Porter of Leon, Iowa.  This is her story and now is the time to hear it, so, Athena, welcome to Cancer Interviews.

Athena Porter: Thank you so much.  for having me, Bruce.

BM: Athena, before we get to your story, we would like to learn a little bit more about you.  If you would, tell us about where you are from, what you have done for work and what you like to do when you are having fun.

AP: Absolutely.  I was born and raised in Iowa and after college and jobs, finally landed in Leon, where my husband is from.  Started a job at a local health center on the admin side, so I do a lot of work there.  Then my husband and I bought a farm, we have a few cows, a lot of land and I enjoy spending time with my two little girls.  I do a lot of community work at my church, so I do spend a lot of time there as well.  So, I really enjoy my rural, small-town community with my family.

BM: When we hear from people diagnosed with cancer, there is usually a point in time in which they experienced something abnormal with their health and that led to their diagnosis.  For you, when was that point and what went wrong?

AP: Like you said, I never had any symptoms throughout my entire experience.  I am a classic first-born daughter, so I am very organized and take care of everything.  I tend to be very proactive.  In my early twenties, I went in for my annual wellness exam.  That was around 2012.  I just went in for my pap smear, get checked out to make sure everything was just fine.  That is when I was told I was HPV positive.  They did a pretty good job of explaining that a worst-case scenario could be cancer, but that my body could get rid of it on its own.  It was a virus that for most people they get rid of, but when you hear the word you ‘cancer,’ you tend me to freak out, and I did at that time, for sure.  They told me to come back in a year and get the virus looked at. I went back, and they what is called a colposcopy, since my pap smear was abnormal again.  They tried to take some additional cells, where they could see the cells on my cervix in hopes that my body would get rid of the virus.  At that time, and for several years after that, I had abnormal paps, until the eventual diagnosis.  That was the beginning of the story.

BM: As a cancer survivor myself, I underwent a biopsy, but I have never heard of the term, Cone Biopsy, which is what you underwent.  Could you describe that procedure?

AP: Leading up to the Cone Biopsy, before that, I had what is called a LEEP procedure.  Before I had kids, I had additional abnormal pap smears.  The LEEP Procedure is an electrical loop that takes the cells out.  After that, I had clear margins, so I was really excited.  I headed into motherhood after that, very excited, so, as a lot of moms do, we delay our screenings.  So, after my second child turned one year old, is when I went back in and had some abnormal results again.  Within a couple years after that is when I finally had the Cone Biopsy because my body just wasn’t getting rid of the virus, my doctor did not like it, the way it looked, so I had the Cone Biopsy.  I know this is a bit graphic, but the anesthesiologist explained to me best, and said the Cone Biopsy is like taking an ice cream scoop and scraping out the cervix cells, trying to get cells to send off to the lab.  It was a pretty tough procedure, nothing compared to my later treatments, but they sent the samples to the Mayo Clinic.  It took a couple of weeks, but I eventually heard back the day after my second daughter turned three, so in December 2022, I had the Cone Biopsy and in January 2023, I got the call that it had turned into adenocarcinoma cancer, endocervical cancer and that’s where I got my diagnosis.

BM: Athena, you had been told by your care team at an earlier stage that a worst-case scenario could be cancer, so perhaps that prepared you for this awful news, but when you got it, how did you react?

AP: Not too well at first.  Like you said, I thought I would be prepared since I had been dealing with the possibility for years, but in the end, I was not prepared.  I was at work at the time when I got the call, I had closed my office door and I cried my eyes out.  When you get the cancer word, you get a lot of dark thoughts that happen, especially because I did not yet know if it was advanced or not.  They were guessing that it wasn’t very far, but that was still unknown on the day when I got the call.  I had those thoughts, like what is my husband going to do, what are my kids going to do, how are they going to handle it if I am not there for them.  I found myself jumping to a worst-case scenario when we know what cancer can take from you.  So, those first couple days were rough trying to comprehend it and trying to share this with my friends was difficult as well.

BM: By the way, we hope you will find time to like and subscribe to our channel, and if you click on the bell icon, you will be notified when we post an interview.  We also want to remind you that on Cancer Interviews, we do not provide medical advice.  If you seek medical advice, please consult a licensed health care professional.

Athena, before we go any farther, I want to circle back to an operative word you referenced at the very beginning: proactive.  You were proactive about getting screened.  Could you articulate the importance of women getting the proper screenings?

AP: I definitely enjoy the opportunity for being an advocate in the preventive space, for sure.  Women can get their cervical cancer screening, the can get the HPV test.  HPV can cause a number of cancers, so being on top of your wellness exam, going and seeing your doctor and advocating for yourself.  Before that, I highly advocate and recommend the HPV vaccine, which can be given as early as age nine and can go all the way up to around 45.  While it is best to be given at an earlier stage when your immunal response can give you a better chance of fighting it off, I like to advocate and educate on the HPV vaccine as well.  My daughter is going to be able to get it in a couple of years, which is crazy to me as a mother seeing her get that old, but to have a vaccine that prevents cancer is groundbreaking, so I want everybody to know about that prevention option as well, when you can just prevent anything like this happening. 

BM: Now, let’s get back to your journey.  You had just been diagnosed.  Where treatment was concerned, did you have options?

AP: I did.  We met with gynecological oncologist.  He discussed some different options.  He asked if we were done having a family, if we were wanting to have more kids.  One option was their solely removing my cervix and while it wasn’t guarantee I could have kids, it would be possible, but with difficulty.  My husband discussed whether our family was complete and we decided we were comfortable having our two daughters, which led to our choosing the other option, which was the radical hysterectomy of removing the uterus, the cervix, the top part of the vagina, the surrounding tissue and lymph nodes and my fallopian tubes.  It was radical indeed, but again, my being proactive, they said that it was localized, that it should not have spread, so to be on the safer side, I chose the radical hysterectomy of taking out all those organs, just in case the cancer tried to spread, so I could prevent any other cancer diagnosis later on.

BM: Okay, Athena.  Two-part question.  First, physically, how you deal with being minus all these vital organs?

AP: I will say the hospital gave me some good medications so I didn’t have to hurt right away, so right away, I felt pretty good; but after those intense medications wore off, within a day, it was just normal pain meds, and it was severe pain in my abdomen.  I always had to have an ice pack on my front with the large incision they had, and somehow my back hurt as well.  It was so sore, so I had a heating pad on my back, which was kind of a mixture of hot and cold, but that helped a lot.  I also had a catheter because just sitting up or laughing or anything like that caused a lot of pain, so getting up to go to the bathroom was difficult.  It helped to have the catheter and I still had it a couple days after I went home.  I was in the hospital for four or five days, which was a lot longer than I thought it was going to be, but it was definitely needed. 

BM: That was the first part of my two-part question.  The second part is, after this procedure, you were not whole.  How did you deal with that at the time, and going forward?

AP: While my husband and I said we were okay with not having any more kids, it was still difficult to know that had been taken from me.  I was accepting of it, but to have that choice taken from me was a hard pill to swallow, for sure.  I like to be a bit more of an optimist, so I am happy that I get to be around for my two daughters, that I will grow old and be able to see them grow up, so I hold on to those positive emotions, instead.  I try not to hold on to those negative ones.  I had such a great support system and I believe in God as well and that gave me the strength to just continue to recover and move forward, and just be the best wife and mom I could be for my family.

BM: Now at some point, you began to trend toward achieving survivorship.  How exciting was that?

AP: It was very exciting, especially when I found my group of women after my procedure.  I knew I had to deal with this, physically, but what am I supposed to expect in the next year.  So, I went online trying to find other cervical cancer survivors who gone through what I went through and eventually I found the organization called Cervivor, and they had a wonderful group of women that you could ask any question without any shame.  They were so welcoming, these women from across the world.  They tell you how to advocate, how to tell your story.

BM: Athena, Cervivor does have a website.  It is https://www.cervivor.org.  Could you tell us what it can do for the women who visit the site?

AP: There is a lot of information, a lot of resources there.  They do multiple blogs each month which touch on different topics, but they also host a lot of online events.  Every year they have a cervical cancer summit that everyone is welcome to.  That is just a great event where providers come and survivors come and there is a lot of learning and a lot of wonderful fellowship as well.  Then every year they do what is called Cervivor School, where you can apply as a survivor and be accepted to the school.  It is a small group of women that they select and then they teach, educate, and provide resources on an advocacy level, really teaching you how to tell your story in an effective way, how to advocate in an effective way in the way that works best for you and your community.  We can ask questions on the cervical cancer side, we can check in with others on how they doing in life, just trying to walk through survivorship with each other and being there through the ups and the downs.  We have other groups, like Cervivor Noir, which is for survivors, women of color to get together and really collaborate and fellowship in that space as well.  There are so many options on the Cervivor website, there is a place for everybody.

BM: For you, let’s talk about the here and now.  You are an active mom, you work on a farm, which cannot be easy.  If you could label your pre-diagnosis health as 100 percent, these days, how close are you to 100 percent?

AP: Definitely not at 100 percent, I count my blessings when I say I am probably close to 100 percent than others.  Because of the surrounding tissue and lymph nodes that they took out, there was some nerve damage done, so there was some urinary issues that I have.  With that nerve damage, I will sometimes have these jabs of pain if I stretch or move the wrong way, but outside of that I definitely count my blessings that I didn’t have to go through additional treatment when I hear of other women who went through things I don’t have to navigate after treatment and for years to come.  I am better off than most and I count my blessings for that.

BM: Athena, thank you very much for sharing an inspirational story and thank you for sharing some very timely information that will be of help to women everywhere.  Athena, thanks very much for being with us on Cancer Interviews.

AP: Thank you so much for having me.

BM: And that will wrap up this episode of the Cancer Interviews podcast.  We want to say as we always do when we conclude, that if you or a loved one are on a cancer journey, you are not alone.  There are people out there like Athena Porter, organizations like Cervivor, that can be of help, that can ease the cancer journey.  So, until next time, we’ll see you on down the road.

Additional Resources:

Support Group:

Cervivor  https://www.cervivor.org

SHOW NOTES

TITLE: Athena Porter, Cervical Cancer Survivor – Leon, Iowa, USA

After close to a decade of abnormal pap smears, a Cone Biopsy indicated Athena Porter had cervical cancer.  To make sure her diagnosis of endocervical adenocarcinoma didn’t spread, she opted for a radical hysterectomy.  With the procedure, her cervix was not the only vital organ removed.  A wife and a mother to two daughters, Athena feels blessed that she can return to work on her Iowa farm. 

Additional Resources:

Support Group:

Cervivor  https://www.cervivor.org

Time Stamps:

02:55  Athena’s journey began in 2012 when a pap smear indicated she was HPV+.

03:47   A year later, a coloscopy revealed the virus was still there.

04:32  Describes a LEEP procedure.

05:37  She next underwent a Cone Biopsy, which let her know she had cervical cancer.

07:03  Athena shares her reaction to her diagnosis.

08:53  She says it is very important to get screened for cervical cancer.

10:32  Says she opted for a radical hysterectomy, which resulted in the removal of her cervix and other organs.

12:10  She explains how she felt physically after the procedure.

13:37  Athena describes how she felt emotionally after the procedure.

14:44  Recalls moving toward survivorship.

20:40   Reiterates the importance of getting screened.

KEYWORDS (tags):

cervical cancer

colposcopy

endocervical adenocarcinoma

LEEP procedure

radical hysterectomy

pap smear

HPV+

athena porter