September is ovarian cancer awareness month and in partnership with HERA Women’s Cancer Foundation, we’re a handful of stories of cancer survivors who are thriving and finding themselves in the outdoors. Eden Ellman’s story is our last of this three-part series. Read about our first HERA Hero, Maggie Luck., and our second, Samantha Lockwood.
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At 45 years old, Eden Ellman was a healthy and active woman with no family history of cancer, so when she felt a lump in her abdomen in 2001 she wasn’t alarmed. She went in to visit her internist on a Friday and by the following week she was in surgery—having a complete hysterectomy and having a grapefruit-sized tumor removed from her abdomen. When she awoke from surgery, her world was shaken: she had ovarian cancer.
Eden’s doctors gave her a 75 percent chance of surviving five years, but only if she did chemotherapy, which she started immediately. She endured six rounds of chemo, one treatment every three weeks for four months. Dealing with her diagnosis and her treatment wasn’t easy and to say she didn’t have bad days would be a lie. She often felt demoralized from her surgery, that she had been stripped of her womanhood. She was angry.
It was her passions that got her through her darkest times: dancing, singing, gardening, and rock climbing. Still, she struggled with planning for her future, which was a big unknown. But she kept climbing and her first post-cancer surgery route was a 5.2 at the Gregory Canyon Amphitheater, in Boulder, Colorado. Though she’d been climbing much more difficult routes—5.9s—prior to surgery, tackling this easier route was a monumental effort and a critical part of her recovery. From that time on, between chemo sessions, Eden climbed to keep her mind off of cancer. When she was finally cancer free, she and her husband went on her “recovery tour,” a three- week climbing road trip to Colorado crags.
While going through her chemo treatments, Eden discovered a way to connect her experience as a cancer survivor with her love of climbing: the HERA Foundation, a non-profit that raises funds and awareness for ovarian cancer. She participated in the 2004 Climb4Life Utah event in Salt Lake City, which was on the one-year anniversary of her last chemotherapy treatment. The four-day fundraising event attracts women and men from around the U.S., and it was a bright light in the darkness of her ordeal.
Since then, Eden has served as a committee chair for the Climb4Life Colorado event and has personally raised over $14,000 for HERA. Eden is passionately involved in the organization because she believes that spreading awareness about ovarian cancer and its symptoms is crucial to saving women’s lives. Eden herself had symptoms—nausea and urinary difficulties—eight months before her surgery. But she overlooked them because she didn’t know they were symptoms until after she was diagnosed.
Today, Eden is seven years cancer free and has a new lease on life. She calls herself a “healthy selfish” because she makes decisions based on what makes her and her loved ones truly happy. “My advice to ovarian cancer patients and survivors is to not be afraid to plan for the future,” says Eden. “The biggest lesson I learned from all that I went through is that nothing in life is guaranteed, and everyone should live the life they want to live every day.”
After her diagnosis, Eden went back to school and earned a Masters in English as a Second Language. She embarked on a new career as a teacher and now works at Front Range Community College in Westminster, Colorado. She also remains actively involved as a committee chair for the Climb4Life Colorado event.
