Lisa was 21 and studying in Hawaii when she was first diagnosed. Although she had been losing weight for about six months, she put it down to her active lifestyle, and it wasn’t until she was having sex with her boyfriend that she realised something was very wrong. “It literally felt like someone had kicked me in the cervix and about four days later I was still in a lot of pain so I went to see a specialist. She barely touched my stomach before she told me something was growing inside of me – she said it was about the size of a small watermelon.” After being referred to a gynaecologist on the island, Lisa was booked in for surgery to remove the growth, which had tripled in size in just three weeks.

Both Lisa and Seren were told they had ovarian cancer after their surgeries as it had not been possible to confirm what their tumours were before that. “I had a week’s wait after my operation before my test results came back,” says Seren. “It was the longest week of my life.” She went on to have chemotherapy and made the decision to defer her first year of university the same month she began the treatment. “The first few sessions were OK, I was actually surprised by how well I felt. They put me on these steroids and I was just bouncing around, but then the last three sessions hit me really hard.”

For Lisa, her first operation was just the beginning. During the surgery her cyst burst and four months later, her cancer returned. While she had recovered remarkably quickly from the first operation – “I was running and surfing three weeks later” – the second one hit her much harder, emotionally and physically. "Having two intense operations, four months apart, was so hard on my body and I was pretty naïve about that going into the second one.” Lisa’s recovery took months – walking even short differences left her exhausted and her physical incapacity was particularly frustrating compared to the active life she led before.

One of the main difficulties facing young women who have been diagnosed with ovarian cancer is how badly the treatment – be that surgery or chemotherapy, or both – can impact their fertility. “We do our best to discuss the long term effects with women and work through the emotion that evokes,” says Vickie Gadd, a gynaecological-oncology clinical nurse specialist working at Maidstone Hospital. “The vast majority of women, regardless of their age, just want to do whatever they need to do to save their life – they’re in survival mode. It’s only after they’ve gone through that initial treatment that reality hits home and they have to come to terms with the impact.”