A Winning Formula

Women’s health centers in Baltimore have multiplied——and they’re meeting a need.

- Rebecca Krikman

At 50, Deb Cohen began feeling constantly bloated and lethargic. A busy law professor at the University of the District of Columbia, the Fells Point resident had delayed her annual visit to the gynecologist. She just figured her body was changing because of menopause.

She was right about that, but didn’t know the half of it: Her symptoms were being caused by a 3.5-pound, 19-centimeter cyst, part of which was cancerous.

“The symptoms were there, I just had no clue,” Cohen says. “No one talks about menopause and what it A will be like. My body was changing, and it never dawned on me that it was cancer.”

It was, in fact, Stage III ovarian cancer. So Cohen turned to what she had come to regard as her trusted team of doctors at The Weinberg Center for Women’s Health and Medicine at Mercy Medical Center, where she had been treated multiple times, beginning with the 2009 removal of a lump in her breast. To treat the cyst, she was referred to Neil B. Rosenshein, a nationally renowned ovarian cancer specialist and director emeritus of The Weinberg Center.

“I’ll never forget sitting there pre-surgery listening to him as he read the list of things that can go wrong, tears running down my face, thinking, ‘Okay, I’m signing my life away.’” But there was no one else she would trust more with a scalpel. In June 2014, Rosenshein successfully removed the cyst. “He’s an amazing man,” Cohen says.

Cohen remains close to him to this day, and continues to return to Mercy for her six-month checkups, even after moving to D.C. in 2015.

“I’m the luckiest unlucky person,” she says. “I had great health care, great doctors, and lived within a mile of Mercy—you don’t get any luckier than that.”