Yes, your doctor is right, your mother should do well.

With relapsed ovarian cancer, there are two general indicators of how well a woman will fare. The first indicator is whether she responded to her first chemotherapy, and the second is how long after the first chemotherapy the cancer needed treating again.

A good response to initial chemotherapy usually means that the tumour shrank considerably, indicating that the cancer was chemosensitive. This means that it was very susceptible to the effects of the initial chemotherapy. The fact that the cancer took several years to come back suggests that is quite slow growing. Experience has shown that cancers that take more time before they re-grow to a size large enough to need treatment again generally respond well to further chemotherapy.

So for those women who have a long interval after the first treatment, there are two generalisations that can be made about the prognosis. Firstly there is a very good chance that they will respond to similar treatment again, i.e. a platinum drug plus or minus another chemotherapy drugs, with a similarly good response. Secondly there is also a good chance that they will have another decent interval before the tumour recurs again.