SM: What lies ahead for you, now that you’re done filming Fresh Meat?
Diem Brown: I started a foundation Live for the Challenge and a website that will hopefully help other people. I really can’t tell you—after doing the Fresh Meat challenge—how much I realized you need other people. How a stupid excursion or doing something you haven’t done before makes your mind so much better. You don’t feel bitter about [your illness]. You feel at peace with every thing. I really felt after the Fresh Meat challenge, “Alright, I’ve done my piece. I’ve done everything I’ve wanted to do. Whatever’s in the cards is in the cards.” [Live for the Challenge] is kind of like the Make-A-Wish Foundation: You get your last hoo-ha. I don’t want to say it’s your last but that was my biggest thing, I never wanted to feel bitter about having cancer. I wanted to find the positive light in it.

SM: What do want to see happen in the future for women like you with ovarian cancer?
Diem Brown: What’s crazy is one out of every 50 women will have ovarian cancer, yet there’s no real push for research. There’s no health test when you go to the gynecologist. More and more young women are getting diagnosed with this. [It used to be that] the early onset was 35, now it keeps going lower and lower. It’s called “the disease that whispers” and I think it needs a megaphone. I’m hoping that it gets as much attention as breast cancer. Breast cancer [research has grown] leaps and bounds after people have really put it in the forefront.

I’m hoping that ovarian cancer will one day be considered something you need to pretest for, because if you catch it early you can survive. The only thing you can do [right now to detect ovarian cancer] is get internal ultrasounds and a CA125 blood test. There are other things being researched, but there’s lack of funding. I’m hoping that through the website and through talking about it, someone somewhere will find the funding for it. I know that the only reason I’m alive right now is because of the funding and the research people did before me. So, I have to be really grateful and realize somebody helped me stay alive, and now I need to help somebody in the future stay alive.