After Kristie Wood gave birth to her daughter in December 2019, she expected her body to slowly return to normal. But in the six months that followed, her stomach didn’t shrink — if anything, it seemed to swell.
At first, the 34-year-old dismissed it, putting the bloating to bad eating habits, hormones, and the demands of new motherhood.
‘I just thought my belly was a bit rubbish after giving birth to a baby for the first time,’ Kristie, who was 29 at the time, says.
‘In hindsight, now that I look back at it, it was quite clear something was wrong, but I was just putting it down to my daughter being born, my stomach not being the same.’
Eventually though, her growing abdomen became ‘too big to ignore’, and in mid-2020, she decided to go to the hospital.
‘They had no idea at first what was going on with me,’ the scientist, from Essex, recalls. ‘I went to the reception and I said, “I’m here because I look like I’m eight months pregnant, but I’m not eight months pregnant.”‘
Kristie was admitted for a CT scan the next morning, with doctors initially suspecting she had a dermoid cyst, a typically benign ovarian tumour.
Her scans were sent for review and she was reassured it was nothing to worry about. But five days later, they called with devastating news — not only was the cyst cancerous, it had ruptured, and she’d need urgent surgery to remove the damaged ovary.
‘It was quite a rapid escalation,’ says Kristie. ‘It was a heck of a lot to go through, and I think it made it worse because I had a baby at home.’
Know the symptoms of ovarian cancer
Common symptoms include:
- Persistent bloating – not bloating that comes and goes
- Feeling full quickly and/or loss of appetite
- Pelvic or abdominal pain (that’s your tummy and below)
- Urinary symptoms (needing to wee more urgently or more often than usual)
Occasionally, you may also experience:
- Changes in bowel habit (e.g. diarrhoea or constipation)
- Extreme fatigue (feeling very tired)
- Unexplained weight loss
- Any bleeding after the menopause should always be investigated by a GP
These symptoms will be:
New – they are not normal for you
Frequent – they usually happen more than 12 times a month
Persistent – they don’t go away
While most new mums were learning to navigate nappies and night feeds, she was navigating surgery, scans, and ultimately chemotherapy alongside making sure six-month-old Louisa was cared for.
Kristie says: ‘I felt guilty about not being there, particularly through the phase where I went through chemo because I was completely useless as it was attacking me all the time.’
As the treatment took its toll, she was unable to even lift her daughter – who she calls ‘the apple of [her] eye’ – or be as present as she wanted to be in Louisa’s first year.
However, there were concerns that cancer cells could have spread into Kristie’s bloodstream when her cyst ruptured, meaning she needed an intensive, nine-week course of BEP chemotherapy.
‘If I’d have got there maybe a week earlier, I could have just had the surgery and would have been done,’ she says.
Kristie had three cycles of the gruelling therapy, spending five days in hospital at a time with cancer-fighting drugs being pumped into her body for hours on end — all during the isolation and stress of the pandemic.
‘It was honestly the most brutal thing I’ve ever been through in my life,’ she says. ‘Sitting there with that drip in your arm was just soul-destroying, especially at the time. We all didn’t know what was going on with Covid, and I’m stuck in a hospital having my immune system destroyed in a global pandemic.’
During Kirstie’s treatment, it was her mum who stepped in to help look after Louisa. She also speaks warmly of the hospital staff who supported her during those few months.
‘They’re absolutely incredible,’ says the mum-of-one. ‘I don’t know how they do it.’
But although the nurses would ‘have a laugh and a joke and just be normal’ with her, hospital restrictions during the pandemic meant Kristie underwent treatment largely in solitude.
‘I didn’t have any visitors throughout the entirety of my chemo,’ she says. ‘So it was a really isolated sort of feeling to just be dropped off at the hospital and left to it.’
Longing to speak to others who could relate to what she was experiencing, Kristie contacted Mummy’s Star, a charity supporting families affected by cancer during or after pregnancy.
She says: ‘I had a lady called Rebecca who worked for the charity phone me weekly during everything to check in on me and just listen, she had been through something similar to me and it was nice to talk to someone who understood.’
The charity also offered financial assistance to help cover costs such as travel and parking during the treatment as she was on maternity leave, which Kristie says was ‘so valuable’ in such a difficult time.
Thankfully, things began to look up, and she later received the happy news that there was no longer any evidence of the disease in her body. And this September, Kristie hopes to celebrate a major milestone: five years cancer-free.
She explains: ‘So far everything has been all clear, and they don’t expect it to change… They said to me that no sane cancer doctor will say 100%, but in the case of me, they will give me 99.9.’
Despite this positive prognosis though, memories of that difficult time still linger.
‘I feel like I’m almost back to normal now that time has passed,’ says Kristie. ‘But I’m not going to ever say I’m fully back to normal.’
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