Cobie Smulders had to demand an ultrasound for doctors to find her ovarian cancer
I know these posts don’t get many comments, but I think this is an important conversation and I like to talk about it. Cobie Smulders is doing the press circuit for Friends from College, a Netflix series that is getting mixed reviews. She’s good at selling it though and I’m enjoying her interviews. Cobie, 36, had ovarian cancer at the age of 25. She first talked about it in 2015, which was several years post recovery. She gave some more interviews about it last fall when she got a pharmaceutical endorsement deal for a prohibitively expensive treatment drug. (I have mixed feelings about that and talked about it here.) The good news is that she’s been cancer free for 10 years and met her goal of having kids. She and her husband, SNL’s Taran Killam, have two daughters aged 9 and 3.
Cobie was on Busy Tonight, where she talked about the fact that she’s been cancer free for 10 years along with how she was diagnosed. She had insisted that she get an ultrasound after doctors were dismissive of her concerns. If she hadn’t done that, things could have turned out much differently for her.
What I will say to women is to know your body as well as you can. It is a hard disease to diagnose. The symptoms are like bloating, pressure. I was 25 when I got diagnosed. I was like ‘something’s not right.’ I went to doctor and demanded an ultrasound. There’s no way to screen for ovarian cancer. Then they found it. ‘No, no, you’re fine. You’re 25, you’re fine.’
After that she talked about the PSA she did with Tesaro, the company she’s working with. It’s excellent advice to ask for screening and to be your own advocate. Sadly that’s not accessible to everyone, particularly Americans. Last year an urgent care facility sent me to the ER as they suspected I had a kidney infection. I didn’t, I just had a bad reaction to the antibiotic I was on. The final cost, including a follow-up visit to a urologist and additional screening, was almost $3,000. I have silver level health insurance under Obamacare and it’s over $500 a month. Healthcare is irreparably broken in the US. Screening and treatment are often luxuries that people can’t afford.
Here’s Cobie’s interview:
Photos via Instagram and YouTube
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