Seamus Heaney's quote popped up in my Facebook feed this morning. A few hours later, I received an email from a fellow ovarian cancer thriver, drawing my attention to a story about a third woman with the same disease: Diana Austin. The CBC article Fredericton woman with terminal ovarian cancer warns others of risks tells Diana's story of raising awareness about the life-prolonging potential of opportunistic salpingectomy, the removal of the fallopian tubes during another surgery. As I shared last week, on World Ovarian Cancer Day 2024, most cases of the most common type of ovarian cancer (high-grade serous carcinoma) start in the fallopian tubes, not the ovaries. Removing the fallopian tubes after childbearing is done, as part of another planned abdominal surgery, can help to reduce the risk of ovarian cancer, as Dr. Gillian Hanley told the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health in February.

I first came to know of Diana, a professor emerita at the University of New Brunswick, when she emailed me last June. It was just a few weeks after her own surprise diagnosis of ovarian cancer. Like me, she was diagnosed by an emergency room doctor at her local hospital. However, her news was much worse than mine. While my doctor had said, "you have ovarian cancer," her doctor had said: "I hate to tell you but ... you've got Stage 4 terminal ovarian cancer." As the CBC article indicates, the ER doctor told her that "the cancer had metastasized everywhere, with tumours all through her abdomen, lungs and in some of her lymph nodes."

But even while still "processing the shock of the last two and a half weeks," Diana told me what action she was taking:

...the only concrete "wise" action I can claim to have even tried to accomplish is that I have become an unashamed one-woman advocacy movement telling *everybody* I speak to, however incidentally, about the CBC story on the BC research study that shows that removing the fallopian tubes is the only method yet found that can hugely reduce the incidence of that sneaky villain, ovarian cancer.

Last June, Diana pointed to the CBC stories This simple surgery could slash ovarian cancer rates in Canada, specialists say and Ovarian cancer researchers disappointed after trial finds regular screenings fail to reduce deaths.

Last week, she gave an interview to Jeanne Armstrong of CBC's Information Morning Fredericton, once again highlighting opportunistic salpingectomy. She reiterated that "There is no screening test for ovarian cancer. It is almost always caught by accident. And, if it's caught by accident, that's why it's almost always caught at Stage 3 or Stage 4. It's frequently caught by emergency room doctors."

And two days ago, the CBC published its companion piece to the radio interview: Fredericton woman with terminal ovarian cancer warns others of risks.

To me, Diana epitomizes what poet Seamus Heaney was driving at in his statement "Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for."

Her relentless efforts to raise awareness about ovarian cancer in general and opportunistic salpingectomy in particular reflect a commitment to "good worth working for" rather than an expectation that things will turn out well for herself.

Diana's thinking of others brings to mind the Greek proverb, "A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit."