If I could go back, I would have been a better advocate for myself earlier

By Kristin Logan

Texas

October 2025

In 2023, I finally thought I had my life figured out. My only child was off to university in the fall. My husband and I were finally homeowners. I was 42, building a business, working full time, lifting weights, running, and eating healthy.

By September of that year, the house of cards was caving in rapidly. I was dying. I couldn’t work and my family was going to lose our home. I didn’t think I would see my 15-year anniversary, my daughter’s 19th birthday or even the year 2024.

It started in the early Spring with weird but seemingly minor health problems, like shortness of breath when I exercised. I ignored it for a few months, thinking I had been slacking off or my sports bra was too tight. After 2 months, when it started to include mild chest/rib pains, I went to the ER, where the doctor told me with a placating pat that it was just panic attacks.

On follow-up, my own doctor suggested exercise-induced asthma and gave me an inhaler that seemed to resolve the problem. I’d also had a period that lasted 4 weeks but thought it was just breakthrough from my IUD combined with perimenopause. I’d had heavier periods suddenly start in 2021, and since my doctor hadn’t thought much of it, I didn’t either. Nonetheless, I set up a pap smear. If anything was wrong, surely it would show on that. I lived in Canada, though, and the pap smear results took 2 months to be done.

By May, I was bloating after every meal, each month looking more pregnant every time I ate. I had to pee more frequently - but my UTI test was negative. I figured the bloating was dietary, something I could resolve myself. Where I lived in BC, Canada, healthcare was so overwhelmed that it never felt like anyone was fully paying attention to my health, and I didn’t have the time to deal with it.  It never felt serious - just a collection of “weird, unrelated” health symptoms that were downplayed by the medical system. I was growing more frustrated with their dismissal.

In July, my pap results came back abnormal for endometrial cells with a colposcopy scheduled for September 26. By this point, the bloating was increasingly severe and disrupting my appetite and was accompanied by pain throughout my abdomen and pelvis. I went to the walk-in doctor at my clinic and after examining my abdomen, he insisted it was Irritable Bowel Syndrome, told me to take Metamucil and chided me for having my IUD removed — a decision I’d made with my doctor because my period had gone so long.

They were all wrong.

On September 2nd, only 3 days after helping my daughter move into her dorm for her first year of college, I ended up in the ER with sharp pain in my left side. The X-ray showed fluid, and a follow-up CT scan of my chest confirmed it. My husband had to walk two miles to the ER at 7 AM to plead with the doctor to run a CT scan of my abdomen and pelvis—because when I told them about the swelling and pain, they refused, saying it “wasn’t related to the fluid in my lungs.” I’m so grateful to have had him as my advocate. The new scan showed nodules throughout my peritoneum, ascites and omentum caking. Even though the radiology report downplayed the presentation, the ER doctor told us right away that it looked like a metastasized cancer - likely ovarian, and if we could afford to go outside of Canada to get treatment, he would recommend doing so. Because of the downplaying in the report, I was still forced to undergo an ultrasound, uterine biopsy, mammogram, and a paracentesis to get to the diagnosis. These were some of the most stressful weeks of our lives. Every day feeling worse, not knowing if I had cancer or something else. But I knew. We both did. On September 18, 2023 I was finally formally diagnosed with High Grade Serous Carcinoma Ovarian Cancer Stage 4A. By that time, my body was in bad shape.

My lungs were always full of fluid, and I could never get them drained. I constantly felt like I could not breathe and couldn’t go up the stairs without stopping to take a break. I had to sleep on a wedge pillow because of the crushing pain caused by the fluid in my lungs — fluid that the hospital kept refusing to drain, even as I struggled to breathe. My muscles were shrinking and weight was falling-off rapidly. Just 2 months ago in in July, I’d run my best 10K to celebrate my 43rd birthday. This couldn’t be real. I was going down fast. And there was nobody I could call to get help.

When you realize you’re facing death, you realize you have nothing left to lose. You can either go all in on saving your life or accept death. I cried at night thinking about my unfinished life, the years of my daughter’s life ahead of her without a mother, the missed opportunities for being proud of the young adult she was becoming. The decades of lost marriage I would miss with my beloved husband of just 14 years - was unacceptable. Our empty nest years before us. My parents having to bury their youngest child. I did not accept those terms. I decided to go all in. I talked to a girlfriend from childhood about the Veterans Affairs (I’m a US citizen, and a US Air Force veteran) and what was happening. She encouraged me to go to the US and give the VA a try. I called the VA and asked how it would work and explained my situation and they advised me on the best chances of success.

When my husband came home from work that day, I told him “I’m going. To United States. Tomorrow.” He sighed with relief. This was the first sliver of hope that I’d live — and I gave it to myself.

What a decision to have to make. I was in a perpetual state of shock. He drove the hour and a half to the ferry terminals, where our daughter met us and I said goodbye to my family-- my biggest supporters — not knowing if we would see each other again. The ferry terminal staff wheeled me away from my family, crying, scared and terrified, with the staff trying to say encouraging things to me.  When my parents saw me wheeled off the ferry, they said they were shocked at how close to death I looked.

A day later, I was taken to the Veteran’s Affairs hospital, struggling to breathe. As a former military service member, now indigent, and in the fight of my life, I was lucky. When I showed up on the doorstep of the VA hospital, drowning in my own lung fluid, a doctor met me at the door, put me in a wheelchair and said “I’m going to take care of you.” And he did. That was the moment I knew, finally, for the first time, I stood a chance at staying alive. The relief I felt rolling through the doors of the VA, knowing that my people had my back, is one I cannot even explain. For the first time, I felt like my life mattered.

He took me on as a patient, sent me to the ER for emergency care, and made sure I got enrolled in the system ASAP, and that the ER trip was covered by the VA, even though I was not yet in their system. He reached out to the Chief of oncology for the Puget Sound VA system and had him personally expedite my case.

Finally, I met with Dr. Renata Urban, at University of Washington Medical Center, Fred Hutch Cancer Center Gynecologic Oncology in Seattle with my parents. She shared the treatment plan with us, answered our questions patiently, reassured me that it was not “too late” (my fear, after all, 7 weeks had passed since that first trip to the ER), and that a fight was ahead of me, but after all I’d been through she thought I was up to it. I had my first treatment the following Monday. Within days, the fluid finally receded. I was able to ditch the wedge pillow I was forced to sleep on. I could eat full meals. The weight started to come back. My hair started to fall out. I shaved my head.

During this time, I discovered that in British Columbia, my referral for treatment had gotten lost. Had I waited for BC to take care of me, I would be dead. The news hit me like a ton of bricks and I recorded a video that night, telling my Instagram followers what had happened. I woke up the next morning to an influx of calls from journalists all wanting to talk to me.

That night, my story aired — the story of a woman who fled Canada to the United States to get healthcare, abandoned by BC Cancer care. The government official in charge of healthcare, the health minister, said “the system doesn’t always get it right, but individuals are welcome to complain, publicly as was done in this case”. It was in infuriatingly dismissive comment - that ignored the thousands of other Canadians who didn’t have my fortune to go to the US for help — many of whom reached out to me in the following days to share their story. I penned an open letter to the health minister about the healthcare system plummeting off a cliff. And suddenly, in the middle of my fight against stage 4 ovarian cancer, I was a voice for millions of British Columbians who were being grossly neglected. I’ve never backed down in that advocacy. By this point, I knew that my life was, and will always be, squarely in my hands before anyone else’s. I read my scans and labs before my doctor to understand them and ask questions. I researched studies on ovarian cancer. It’s how I learned about HIPEC surgery - and was able to ask that it be included in my treatment plan. I read the studies about maintenance therapy and recurrences.

And when I had an adhesive bowel obstruction while visiting home in Canada in February of 2024 and was left without surgery, nutrition or options for surgery elsewhere in BC, my husband and I found ourselves medically transporting me, back to the border where my parents waited to race me to UWMC for emergency surgery, where they discovered my bowels were perforating from the adhesions. For the second time in less than a year, waiting in Canada. Nobody should have to take themselves out of a medical facility to stay alive - but that’s exactly what kept me from going septic.

I returned to Canada in April 2024 and settled back into life, hopeful that I could return to health and advocate for change as a commentator in the news and in public settings. But, as is often the case with late-stage ovarian cancer when it’s not treated quickly, I had a recurrence. When my blood results returned elevated, I started packing. My Canadian oncologist told me to wait a couple of weeks for a CT scan, but I already knew - this cancer doesn’t wait, and neither will I. In contrast, my US medical team offered to get me into the scanner the same day. And for the third time in 18 months, my husband and I found ourselves racing for the border.

My diagnosis was upgraded to recurrent HGSC ovarian cancer (high-grade serous carcinoma), something I will have to deal with for the rest of my life, I’m told. That was when my husband and I knew then that our time in Canada was over. We filed the paperwork for him to get a US visa and went through that process while I fought cancer a second time. Just as I went into remission, he received his green card and we moved to the United States, where I began maintenance therapy on Avastin and am working on recovering my health. If I could go back in time, I would have been a better advocate for myself earlier - about the time I got patted on the head and diagnosed with panic attacks — when I knew I didn’t have anxiety. I have since tuned in more closely to my body and its signals, knowing that when facing a medical system that has a habit of gaslighting and dismissing women’s health symptoms, I cannot do that to myself.