It s a star-studded list, with comediennes Madeline Kahn and Gilda Radner, former Connecticut Gov. Ella Grasso and Harper s Bazaar Editor Liz Tilberis among the most noteworthy. I have a ton of faith, and I don t want to waste time dwelling, says Pittala, who in April 1995 was diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer that had spread into her lymph nodes. But I want to go on living. Approximately 25,000 women are diagnosed annually with ovarian cancer, while more than 14,000 die from it. It s the fifth most prevalent cancer in the United States, and also one of the most insidious.
Most women experience few, if any, symptoms in the early stages of the disease.
In fact, it s so difficult to detect that only 24 percent of cases are diagnosed, and treated, before the cancer has spread. Pittala says she s proof that people can not just survive ovarian cancer, but live fully with it. Attitude and outlook are everything, she says. Medical researchers are also making progress developing better screening tests. And surgery, followed by new combinations of chemotherapy drugs, have brought about improved survival rates in recent years, says oncologist Andrea Silber, M.D., director of Saint Raphael s Cancer Control and Early Detection Unit.