Be Aware, Be Pushy: After Losing His Wife To Ovarian Cancer, Doug Wendt Started A Foundation To Empower Women

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Doug Wendt and his wife, Alice, were together for 25 years. After losing her to ovarian cancer, Doug decided to use their experience to help raise awareness about the disease. Doug said that Alice had dealt with gynecological pain for a long time, but like many women, she wasn’t aware that it could be a cause for concern — she just considered it a part of life.

“Alice had lived with gynecological pain for almost the entirety of our marriage and never addressed it, just because women don’t see the symptoms coming,” Doug told SurvivorNet. “A lot of women who go to their doctor are told, it’s just what it means to be a woman. You have painful urination, you have unexplained bloating, sudden fluctuations in your weight – it goes up, it goes down, periods that are not consistent and you don’t know why, you have pain in intercourse. These all sound pretty benign to most women if not all.”

Doug went on to stress that this way of thinking can be dangerous. He created an organization in Alice’s honor, the Cardinal Cancer Foundation, with the mission of empowering women to take control of their health — and to report and question symptoms when they have them. He also said that the outcome for his wife, who battled the disease for two years, may have been different if her symptoms had been looked into earlier.

“We don’t know what the outcome could have been if she had addressed [the symptoms] earlier,” Doug said. “Or if I had demanded that she address them earlier, as a husband who was more involved and more proactive … That’s really the focus of the Cardinal Foundation. Yes, we want to help women facing ovarian cancer, [but] we’d really rather they not get it at all. We’d also rather that if they do have to face it, they face it earlier rather than later, and that means that we all have to be a lot more attentive to the real health needs of women in our society.”

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