Lindsey Poulsen arrived from Los Gatos, Calif., to play soccer at UH-Hilo, where she graduated with an accounting degree in 2014 and a competitive spirit that would help her fight a relentless opponent.
Lindsey Poulsen arrived from Los Gatos, Calif., to play soccer at UH-Hilo, where she graduated with an accounting degree in 2014 and a competitive spirit that would help her fight a relentless opponent.
Poulsen, 24, was recently hit with devastating news: she was diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer, which she is battling on Oahu.
For all types of ovarian cancer, the five-year survival rate is 45 percent, according to the website www.cancer.org.
With boyfriend Jonathan James, a former UHH baseball player and 2014 graduate, Poulsen moved to the Bay area for a year for an internship while he pursued a baseball career.
But James tore his ACL, and his insurance wouldn’t cover physical therapy unless it was in Hawaii, so they headed to Oahu, where she got a job as a certified public accountant.
They were beginning a happy, young couple’s life: James is a manager at the Waikiki Sheraton, and they found a place in Manoa, where their two cats also live in comfort.
James has been working to get his Transportation Worker Identification certificate so he can work on maritime vessels and facilities.
Poulsen said his Waikiki Sheraton boss has been accommodating, and James hasn’t missed a certificate appointment class.
Her work ECA LLP, a local public accounting downtown firm, has also been more than accommodating. She works a couple hours from home so she can keep her insurance.
Poulsen’s doctors estimated her cancer started around October 2015. But she didn’t see the red flags (feeling tired, eating less, losing weight, etc.) because public accounting requires long hours and stressful work.
On Wednesday, April 13, six months later, Poulsen woke up with a stomach ache and thought she ate something bad. The next day, she had sharp stomach and lower-back pain.
Poulsen went to her primary care doctor on Friday, April 15, thinking she had a kidney infection. She was sent to the ER at Kapiolani Medical Center for scans just in case it was her appendix.
After 10 hours in the ER and multiple scans and tests, results showed a softball-sized tumor growing. Doctors were hopeful that is was benign due to her age and family history of benign ovarian cysts (on her mom’s side).
A week later on April 20, Poulsen had surgery to remove the tumor at Kapiolani. But it wasn’t benign. It wasn’t a harmless softball.
Poulsen’s oncologist, Dr. Michael Carney, told her they found a significant amount of small tumors all over her abdomen and removed her omentum, right fallopian tube, and appendix.
On Friday, April 22, the lab results came back, and Poulsen was officially diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer.
“When I woke up from surgery and was told I had cancer, I was devastated,” Poulsen said. “I went into surgery confident it was benign. Cancer hadn’t even really seemed like a real possibility. I had associated all the side effects of cancer with just being tired from work for so long, that I just didn’t understand how I went from healthy to basically dying in a matter of a few hours. But over the next two days, I just became hopeful that it was ovarian cancer since ovarian cancer and chemo seem to get along better than others. So when I found out it was ovarian cancer, we all cheered.”
Poulsen has a black belt in Taekwondo. Her mentality is to kick cancer in the head. Cancer never takes a day off, so maybe it’s a good thing she spent a lifetime kicking soccer balls.
“I was told by a doctor in the hospital that no one has ever worried away cancer. I have been trying to live by that each day,” she said. “I don’t even know where to begin when it comes to soccer helping me with all of this. But the two biggest things are mental toughness and the support system I have from players and coaches ranging from the UHH team, all the way back to when I was 5 and we didn’t even keep score yet. Once a team, always a team.
“Knowing so many people are thinking of you and love you not only makes me happy, but it reminds me that I am fighting for more than just myself. Nothing gives you motivation more than fighting for the people you love.”
Poulsen’s game plan is 12 weeks of chemotherapy, a full hysterectomy, and 12 more weeks of chemo. She goes to chemo every Thursday.
She described the after-effects of chemo as a mix between playing a soccer game and having the flu.
Her parents, Tom and Jill Poulsen, moved to Reno, Nev., and her younger brother Tyler is at Boise State.
“I have decided to stay in Honolulu for a couple of reasons, the main reason being I love Kapiolani,” Poulsen said. “Dr. Carney is kind and confident, which is exactly the type of captain I need running this team. Every other doctor and nurse I have had were amazing, and I would recommend Kapiolani in a heartbeat.
“I also feel like if I have to have cancer and go through this, why not do it somewhere as beautiful as Hawaii. I love living here, I love that I can go sit in the sand and swim in the ocean after chemo if that is what I want to do. I also want to try to keep life as normal as possible.”
On her mom’s side, Poulsen has lost family members to cancer. On her dad’s side, she lost her grandpa to colon cancer.
But her grandma beat the same ovarian cancer, and her dad beat prostate cancer.
Poulsen inherited that same fighting family gene.
She has lost her hair. But her hair will grow back. Poulsen has found a strength that she always had and an inspiration from others.
“This has already made me a stronger person, and I am only 6 weeks in,” she said. “Even the healthiest of people can have their lives change overnight. We see or hear about it all the time, but until it happens to you it doesn’t feel like a real threat.
“Life really is too short to not make the most of each day. I am going to live life grateful for each day and grateful for all the beautiful people in my life, and that is how I am going to beat this.”
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Jenna Hufford, the current goalie at UHH, has started a GoFundMe page for Poulsen, the link is: https://www.gofundme.com/2jjdh3t4.