Ovarian cancer: Mum Lavania will never look at this family photo the same after horror discovery

Most Christmas family photos evoke nothing but good memories.

Not this photo, not for Lavania Parker.

It looks like your classic holiday happy snap, but the Victorian mum of two will never look at it the same way because of what she learned just weeks after it was taken.

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Like millions of Australian women and girls, Parker knew “nothing” about ovarian cancer before she was diagnosed in January 2024.

She’d assumed the bloating that had plagued her for weeks in the leadup – starting around the time the Christmas photo was taken – was simply the result of a few too many holiday treats.

In truth, it was one of the only signs her body was secretly being ravaged by one of the most lethal cancers in Australia.

”It was December 2023 when I noticed that my stomach was getting a bit bloated,” the 46-year-old told 9honey.

“But, I mean ,bloating, you know – for women, it happens. It’s very easy to put it down to a whole array of things.”

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Parker ignored it when she went back to work in January 2024 and tried to ignore the pain that soon made itself known in her abdomen and lower back.

A busy working mum, she didn’t get around to seeing her GP before things got serious.

On the morning of January 24, Parker woke in severe pain and took herself straight to hospital. She was just being cautious but that decision may have saved her.

“They ran a bunch of tests, drained four and a half liters of fluid from my stomach, and on January 30 I was diagnosed with stage three ovarian cancer,” she said.

More than 1800 women are diagnosed with the disease every year in Australia, about 70 per cent of them in the advanced stages like Parker.

Of those, fewer than one in three will survive more than five years.

The dire statistics terrified Parker when she first Googled her diagnosis, but it wasn’t her own mortality she was worried about.

“I was just numb … all I could think about was, ‘How am I going to tell the kids?'” she said.

“Am I going to be burdening my kids with a mum with cancer for the rest of their lives?”

But Parker didn’t have long to think about it, given she had to start aggressive cancer treatment two days later.

With no time to process what had happened, the mum of two was thrown head-first into the complicated and desperately underfunded world of ovarian cancer.

In the five months that followed she underwent six round of chemotherapy and a full hysterectomy, which sent her into medical menopause.

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Parker was lucky to have an incredible medical team to support her, including a support nurse through the Teal Support Program who helped her deal with the mental and emotional fallout of such a staggering diagnosis.

“I tried to be strong about it later on, but in the early days it was still very scary not knowing where this was going to lead and how I was going to respond to treatment,” she said.

“In my mind, I was just like, ‘I’m not a bad person, why is this happening to me?'”

Despite years of awareness campaigns and fundraising, ovarian cancer remains one of the most underfunded cancers in Australia and its putting lives at risk.

Parker never knew what symptoms she had to look out for, she had no idea that there is currently no early detection test for ovarian cancer, and she never would have dreamed that it could affect someone as young as her.

Her diagnosis made her realise how little she really knew about this disease – which kills one woman every eight hours in Australia – but it also led her to a new purpose, one that brought her family even closer together.

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While Parker went through treatment, her husband and kids fundraised for the Ovarian Cancer Research Foundation (OCRF) on her behalf and once she was declared cancer-free, she joined the fight.

Now a passionate OCRF advocate and 2025 Witchery White Shirt Ambassador, she is determined to reduce the number of Australian women living in ignorance.

Now she’s become a living warning; a warning women in their 40s can get ovarian cancer, that it doesn’t discriminate, and that we need to talk about it if we want to protect the next generation.

“I’ve been very open about it, just because I think it helped me navigate this horrible journey,” she said, because staying silent about women’s health serves no one.

Though she’s been cancer-free for almost a year, Parker is still on maintenance treatment and may never truly be out of the woods.

Ovarian cancer has an 80 per cent chance of recurrence, meaning it’s terribly likely her cancer will return in the next five years.

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Despite that, she’s hopeful today on World Ovarian Cancer Day (May 8).

She’s hopeful her story can make a difference, that breakthroughs in treatment are on the horizon, that the girls in her life will grow up knowing the warning signs to watch out for – and that she will have many more years with her own children.

”I’m hoping and being positive that it’s not going to rear its ugly head again,” Parker said.

The launch of the Global Ovarian Cancer Research Consortium today has given her even more reason to feel hopeful.

An alliance uniting the OCRF with three other leading ovarian cancer research organisations in the US, Canada, and UK, the Consortium has already announced a game-changing $1.5 million grant to address ovarian cancer survival rates.

“I’m hopeful that in the not so distant future, we will have an early detection test and others won’t have to go through what I did.”

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