"Joy really is all around us if we look hard enough, even if we sometimes have to pull away the spider webs hiding it in the darker corners."

— Diana Austin (1951 - 2024)

I began corresponding with Diana Austin last summer, a few weeks after she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer following a trip to the emergency department of her local hospital. (How familiar that sounded.) A fellow ovarian cancer thriver connected me and Diana, thinking that my blog might be helpful to Diana and that her wisdom might be helpful to me.

In June 2023, Diana introduced herself by email, saying "I am not yet 3 weeks from my own shock Emergency Room diagnosis." She faced a grim prognosis, telling me, "I know from the sympathetic Emergency Room doctor and recent biopsy results that I am already at stage 4b." She continued: "I also know that this late stage combined with MS of around 40 years means that there are very few options, if any." Despite the weight of the challenges before her, Diana demonstrated hope, humour and humility in her writing. She said to me, "I’m glad to have been introduced to your blog and I will from now read it regularly, because I too have always been a Freudenfreude type of person, and your posts are like sunshine."

Freudenfreude—wrote psychologist Juli Fraga in her The New York Times article The Opposite of Schadenfreude Is Freudenfreude. Here’s How to Cultivate It—is "Finding pleasure in another person's good fortune." Fraga stated that the term freudenfreude was inspired by the German word for joy and that it describes "the bliss we feel when someone else succeeds, even if it doesn’t directly involve us."

Diana's own form of freudenfreude was to raise awareness of opportunistic salpingectomies—the removal of the fallopian tubes as an elective procedure during another planned abdominal surgery—as a means of reducing the risk of ovarian cancer. I've written several posts about this procedure, including referencing Diana's efforts to raise awareness of the option:

I also pointed to the work of Dr. Gillian Hanley of the University of British Columbia who told the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health in February 2024 that, in a study, researchers saw zero cases of high-grade serous cancers among approximately 26,000 people who had had an opportunistic salpingectomy. She noted that high-grade serous cancers account for 70% of ovarian cancers and 90% of deaths from the disease.

Even in June 2023, not yet one month into her own cancer journey, Diana had become what she called "an unashamed one-woman advocacy movement." She started telling everybody she spoke to about the procedure. I replied to Diana's email, saying: "Your story is beautiful—full of hardships (as so many stories are) but also full of determination and triumph. I don't know what your recent diagnosis means for you, but I hope that you are able to find peace and joy. It's great that you are taking the opportunity to tell others about the elective removal of fallopian tubes. More people should know about this option."

And more people did, no doubt, learn of opportunistic salpingectomies as a result of Diana's efforts. In May 2024, Diana gave an interview to Jeanne Armstrong of CBC's Information Morning Fredericton, once again highlighting opportunistic salpingectomy. Diana 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."

My last communication with Diana was in May 2024. She emailed in response to my post Good worth working for, in which I had shared a bit about her story. She told me that she was honoured by the quote I had included from Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney: "Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for."

Today, I learned from the same friend who had brought Diana and me together a year ago that Diana had passed away. My friend shared this obituary and I found another tribute to Diana online, which indicated that she had died on August 19, 2024. Diana did much good, including sending me a cheer-up email last summer, when complications associated with my breast reconstruction were getting me down, and other emails in which she shared the blessings she counted in her life.

I wanted to honour her life and good work with this post. I will take her memory with me on my Ovarian Cancer Canada Walk of Hope on September 8.