When cancer invades, it does more than attack the body; it fractures the web of normal life. And when that cancer is ovarian, the so-called "silent killer," those fractures deepen in ways many never notice. As a woman and as a daughter who lost her mother to ovarian cancer, I am determined to transform grief into action. Because no one facing cancer, patient or family, should ever feel they must do it alone.

Globally, in 2022, there were more than 324,000 new cases, and projections warn that by 2050, annual diagnoses will surge over 55% to nearly half a million. In the U.S., the number of ovarian cancer cases is predicted to be more than 20,000, and about 12,000 will die from it in 2025. The disease is often discovered in advanced stages: only about 20 percent of ovarian cancers are caught when still confined to the ovaries or pelvis, and once that boundary is crossed, long-term survival rates drop steeply.

The statistics tell part of the story, but not all of it. What they cannot capture is the isolation, the vulnerability, the emotional and logistical unraveling that patients and families endure during the months, and sometimes years, of fighting.

My mother, Carol Lynn Harris, was a force of nature. A dedicated educator, a grandmother who baked and crafted and greeted holidays with zeal, she was the kind of person everyone leaned on. When she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in December 2015, we........

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