The shock was obvious on Anne Warren’s grandson’s little face as he stared at her swollen stomach.
“Gosh, Granny, your tummy is really big!” he said, his eyes wide with horror.
The seven-year-old’s innocent words really hit home for Anne (60), of Westport. over the last few years, she had noticed that her stomach had slowly grown until it was huge and now she could barely walk.
“I felt bigger and more uncomfortable than when I was pregnant years earlier with my children. In fact, this was like I was 12 months pregnant with a baby elephant!”says divorcée Anne, who has three grown-up children and five grandchildren. “I knew I wasn’t pregnant – I’ve been in menopause for years, but I also knew that something was badly wrong with me. My stomach felt round and funny, as hard as a rock.
“I had put on weight over time, but it didn’t feel the same as fat.”
Anne was already an invalid due to severe arthritis and has had a double mastectomy for breast cancer. When she also began to feel seriously ill nine weeks ago – as well as noticing the swelling was increasing – she knew something was seriously wrong.
“I kept being sick, and I couldn’t eat. Breathing was difficult – if felt like my lungs were being crushed – and my abdomen was so heavy I had to roll out of bed. I could barely walk and couldn’t stand for long. If I wanted to wash my feet in the shower, I had to drop a flannel and rub my feet against it because I couldn’t bend down,”she says.
Then the pains in her side began. “I kept going to the after-hours doctors’ surgery because I was in agony,”says Anne. “They gave me an X-ray but it showed nothing. When I asked what the swelling might be, I was told it was just fat.
“It was devastating to feel there was nothing anyone could do to help me.”
Eventually, her friends became so concerned by how unwell she was, they took Anne to another doctor who sent her to Greymouth to see a gynaecologist.
“The specialist was wonderful,”says Anne. “She did blood tests and sent me for a full scan. But I almost didn’t want to know. I was terrified it was cancer.”
When she returned to the doctor for the results, Anne received shocking news. “She quietly told me that a large mass had been found on one of my ovaries and that I needed surgery as soon as possible,” says Anne. “The X-ray hadn’t picked it up because it was tissue and not bone. By then, I was so badly dehydrated from being sick and unable to eat that I needed to be in hospital anyway. I assumed it was stomach cancer and that I would never go home again. I thought I was dying.”
The operation was to reveal something even the doctor had not seen before. Anne was woken after the surgery by a nurse saying, “It was 10.2kg, Anne!”
“I had no idea what she meant until I saw the doctor and she explained that they had found a huge ovarian tumour that weighed 10.2kg,”says Anne, looking at photographs of the growth. “I was cut from my groin right up past my bellybutton, just to get it out.”
The photographs, taken during and after the surgery, brought home the sheer size of the mass she had carried for so long.
“I was told it had been growing for years but I hadn’t felt it until it started to crush my internal organs. It would have killed me if I hadn’t had surgery,” Anne says.
“The doctor was so amazed by the size of the growth and the fact I was able to carry it around for so long, she has had one of the photographs framed. It hangs in her office.”
Anne has worked out that the combined birth weights of her two daughters and son – who weighed 2.3kg, 4.2kg and 4kg at birth – add up to almost the same as the tumour.
“It was like I was carrying triplets – and good-sized triplets at that!” she says.
As well as being free of her huge burden, Anne also got the good news that it was a non-cancerous ovarian cyst and her internal organs would return to normal in time.
“I had to stay in hospital for eight days, until I was well enough to eat. It was such a relief to have proper food rather than liquid, after nine long weeks,” says Anne. “I lost 30kg in total in that time, including the weight of the cyst, I went from 145kg to 115kg, and from dress size 34 to size 22.”
Now recovering well at home, Anne feels better than she has for a long time.
“I’ve been given a new lease of life,”she says. “For years, this thing was growing in my tummy. It could have killed me, but now I have a second chance.”
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