Atlanta woman wins her fight against cervical cancer

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

(HealthDay News) -- Chris Wilkinson was just 29 when she began experiencing symptoms of pre-menopause such as hot flashes and mood swings.

"It was just overnight that it happened," said Wilkinson, an insurance broker, who lives in Atlanta and is now 35.

When her menstrual cycle became irregular, she decided to visit her gynecologist. "I had always been very regular, as far as my periods had gone, and I had some spotting," she said. "I'd never had spotting before. So I said, 'OK, it's time to go.' "

Wilkinson had undergone her regular Pap smear in May, and it was now October. But, the doctor felt something abnormal when he examined her, so he sent her immediately to the hospital for a biopsy.

"When they were getting ready to wheel me in and put me out, he [the doctor] said, 'If we can just take it out, we'll take it out. If we can't, we'll talk about it later,' " she recalled.

Later, in recovery, her doctor came to talk with her. "The doctor said, 'We didn't do anything, we'll talk to you about it when you get up to your room,' " she said.

When Wilkinson got to her hospital room, her family and doctor were waiting for her. All were crying.

"When your doctor's crying, that's a bad sign," she said. "I said, 'What's going on?' The doctor was very forthright. He said, 'I'm sorry honey, you have cancer.' "

"I don't think I skipped a beat. I just said, 'What do we do next?' It was a fight-or-flight moment, and there was nowhere to run. I had to fight," she said.

"The tumor was at the top of the cervix and was growing into the uterus," Wilkinson added. "When they did the Pap smear they just didn't hit that part of it. Because it was growing into the uterus, it had room to expand without hitting anything else."

The tumor was 5.5 centimeters large. "It hadn't penetrated any of my other organs, thank goodness," she said.

A week after her diagnosis, Wilkinson underwent surgery to remove the tumor.

"I had a radical hysterectomy, and they removed the tubes and ovaries as well," she recalled. The surgeon also took out several lymph nodes for samples, to see if any cancer had spread, and performed a bone marrow tap to make sure cancer hadn't invaded Wilkinson's bones.

The doctor found no evidence of cancer spreading anywhere else. Still, Wilkinson went through six weeks of external radiation therapy and three weeks of internal radiation therapy.

The radiation therapy went as expected, although Wilkinson found herself surprised at some of the side effects.

"They tell you that your skin will get red, like you've had a terrible sunburn," she said. "They don't tell you it might also turn black." She and a friend joked about the "blowtorch skin" she developed near her groin.

Wilkinson has remained cancer-free. But she remains concerned about a relapse.

"You're no longer actively doing anything about the cancer, but it's still very actively navigating your life," she said. "For the first two years, I was holding my breath. It's not so much a fear now, as a possibility. It's the kind of knowledge you can't know. While every time I sneeze I know it's not cancer, at the same time I know that I can get bad news, it is possible. And I know if it happens again, I'll just take care of it."

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