Erin Konrath

When Erin Konrath was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she was 45.  A mother of four tweens and teens (2 boys and 2 girls), a photographer running her own business, and just crazy life in general kept her busy. So busy, in fact, that she didn’t think twice when she started experiencing what she thought were peri menopausal symptoms. 

“Looking back on it,” Erin recalls, “the symptoms were actually kind of classic ovarian cancer symptoms, but they are so similar to what woman experience hormonally.” It wasn’t until after her diagnosis that Erin realized she hadn’t been eating as much as she normally would, felt as though she had a UTI without pain, was constipated, and exhausted — “bone tired.” 

She brushed aside a lot of those symptoms to just getting older and honestly didn’t even give much thought to the others until one night, walking to her car for work, she broke her foot. “So that made me slow down,” she says. “I was on the couch for a week. Do I ever lay on the couch? Never.” 

    During her recovery from her broken foot, she noticed a spot in her abdomen that felt strange. “Every morning I would wake up and my hand would go straight to that place and I would kind of push in and be like, ‘What is going on here?’ The more I would dig in the more it would hurt. I knew something was off. Something was not normal.

    Erin decided to get the spot checked out at urgent care before a trip to New York. After an exam, the doctor told her, “If you were my sister, I would send you to the ER right now. Like right now, go, right now.”

    Shaken, Erin walked to the emergency room on her broken foot, where they gave her a CT scan. Then, all alone in the emergency room, the ER doctor told her that she had ovarian cancer. “That part was extremely traumatic,” she says. “To be by yourself and hear that news completely out of the blue -. I was mortified. It was horrific the way I found out.”

Erin had surgery scheduled within three weeks of her diagnosis to remove the grapefruit-sized tumor on her right ovary. She and her doctors were hopeful that it wouldn’t be cancerous, but when she woke up from the surgery, she was told that she’d had a full hysterectomy and that she had endometrioid and clear cell ovarian cancers. Although she was diagnosed in stage 1A, Erin decided to have three rounds of chemotherapy, carbo and Taxol. 

During her treatment, Erin cold capped, freezing her hair follicles and saving her hair. She says, “it was really good for my four kids not to see their mom bald. I feel like it helped them through the process.”

Today, Erin is living with no evidence of disease, but she is passionate about sharing the mental toll that the experience has had on her. “I definitely suffer from PTSD, and I’m not ashamed to say that. I’m very passionate about the whole mental health aspect of post-cancer. I think there needs to be a lot more support around what happens after.”

A contributing factor to her PTSD, Erin says, is the abrupt and inappropriate way she was given her diagnosis. Due to her experience, she is now involved in Survivors Teaching Students, a program run by OCRA in which survivors teach medical students about ovarian cancer by sharing stories of diagnosis, treatment, and survivorship.

“Physically, I feel good. Mentally, I’m still struggling. But I’m doing things like yoga, talk therapy, and focusing on my nutrition to help me feel better mentally. Just talking about things and being open helps.”

Erin is back to running her successful photography business, and you can find her on Instagram at @erinkonrath.