Group battles silent killer

03:34 PM EDT on Thursday, August 25, 2005

Dianne Estes helps women look good. She hopes they feel good. She's a hairdresser -- and survivor.

“Being with so many women, it gives me that window there, that the information I can share with them if they ask,” she says.

If anyone asks, she'll talk about ovarian cancer, something with which she was diagnosed five years ago. Her symptoms: feeling bloated.

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“It was a terrible bloating… like I was eight or nine months pregnant,” she says.

One doctor told her it was gastritis. She believed it was more serious. There was no family history, though -- her pap smears were normal. So were both pregnancies with her daughters.

“This just literally came out of the blue-- that's why we need a test so desperately.”

There is no test for ovarian cancer. Only recently has a support group formed in Kentuckiana called OAK -- Ovarian Awareness of Kentucky.

Dianne is two years cancer-free. A poem about an oak tree hangs on her living room wall, signed by other OAK survivors, a celebration of life.

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Meet Dr. Lillian Yeager. Still fighting the good fight, she's reading from a book of letters given to her on her 60th birthday.

“The days I’m feeling good, I act well. On days when I’m not feeling good, I act well,” she says.

Dr. Yeager's office at Indiana University Southeast gives you a sense of what she is -- dean of nursing -- and a sense of who she is. Faith and family keep her going. A picture of her daughter keeps her smiling.

Dr. Yeager has undergone four surgeries since her diagnosis in 2001. The wig she wears disguises the ravages of her chemotherapy. It took months for doctors to realize her stomach pain was ovarian cancer, known as the silent killer.

“It’s silent because you think it’s other things,” she says.

Cancer is part of her life but it doesn't keep her from living. She just returned from a cruise and is planning another trip this winter.

“I take it a day at a time,” Dr. Yeager says.

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One day at a time is also Dee Edwards’s motto.

It's a new school year at Crosby Middle School but her students are well aware she's in the fight of her life and for her life with ovarian cancer. They helped raise money so she can travel to MD Anderson in Texas, where she's taking an experimental drug.

“It’s an anti-hormone drug, it keeps my body from producing estrogen,” she says.

Edwards has the support of her school family and her own family. Her son Sean and husband Frank. She was diagnosed not too long after Sean was born in a perfectly normal pregnancy. She was floored when, at 32, what she thought was stomach flu turned out to be ovarian cancer.

“Cancer or anything like that was furthest thing from my mind,” she says.

Dee had a complete hysterectomy and travels to Texas every three months for treatment.

“These are the cards dealt you. You can’t spend time getting upset about it ‘cause it’s not really helpful,” says Frank Edwards.

Dee is moving forward, cherishing each moment with her husband and son, who just turned 4 years old.

“We wanted to have another child and I can’t, but we’re very blessed to have Sean,” says Dee. “He's worth living for.”

Web story produced by Jay Ditzer.