“Florida is treating you well,” guests raved to Louise Altese-Isidori as she mingled at the opening celebration for the newest outpost of her husband’s popular Manhattan Italian restaurant, Arthur & Sons.
The lifelong New Yorker, 50, had recently traded the Big Apple for the Sunshine State with her family — and by all appearances, she was flourishing. What she didn’t know was that a deadly disease was silently spreading through her body.
“Everyone kept complimenting me and telling me how great I looked,” Altese-Isidori recalled. “Meanwhile, I was riddled with cancer.”
Louise Altese-Isidori felt perfectly healthy when she received a devastating diagnosis: ovarian cancer that had already spread so extensively she would ultimately lose seven organs.
The lifelong New Yorker had experienced no warning signs — no pain, discomfort or other symptoms suggesting cancer was silently growing inside her body.
Her diagnosis came only because she insisted on getting a test another doctor had dismissed as “unnecessary” — a decision that may have saved her life.
Clear test, close call
Altese-Isidori had never given much thought to monitoring her ovarian health until her fertility doctor recommended a transvaginal sonogram every six months.
Another doctor later told her the frequent scans weren’t necessary, but Altese-Isidori figured getting one annually was “no big deal.”
That choice would prove crucial.
Last October, during a routine gynecological visit, her doctor discovered a large cyst on one of her ovaries.
Altese-Isidori hadn’t felt a thing.
Louise Altese-Isidori and her husband, Joe Isidori, pictured about a month before she received her cancer diagnosis in December.
Given the cyst’s size, her doctor ordered an Ova1 blood test to determine whether it could be cancerous. The results came back negative — and a second test a month later was also clear.
But the cyst wasn’t going away.
At her doctor’s recommendation, Altese-Isidori decided to have her ovaries removed. She wasn’t planning to have any more children, and the procedure seemed like the safest course of action.
