It wasn’t cancer at first. No, at first it was a ruptured ovarian cyst, one that required immediate surgery to stop the haemorrhaging of blood into my abdomen. The doctors told me there would be an oncologist in the room during surgery to assess how the cyst looked, but I was too young to have cancer, nobody was worried. When I woke up, the first thing I asked was, “Is it cancer?” And the doctors assured me once more that it wasn’t. But by the second week of July, I was sitting in an oncologist’s office at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, waiting to hear my treatment plan for what turned out to be an ovarian germ cell tumour, a very rare type of ovarian cancer that originates in the egg cell. The first thing my brother said to me after being diagnosed was “don’t Google anything.” So I didn’t, but I learned something about my cancer right away. Germ cell tumours account for less than 2% of ovarian cancers overall. But when they do strike they tend to occur in young women like me.