Health diagnosis warning for young
25yo GC woman taking on breast cancer
A 25-YEAR-OLD Gold Coast woman was on a family cruise when she discovered a lump in her breast, just a few days before Christmas.
Bianca Hinton said she assumed the one to two centimetre “circular” lump was a cyst but “decided to get it checked anyway”.
On January 9, Ms Hinton was officially diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer, a rare and aggressive form of cancer which had also spread to her lymph nodes.
The videographer, who has worked with Aussie pop band Sheppard as well as country music singer Casey Barnes, is now using her platform to share the message that young women can be diagnosed with breast cancer as well.
“I’m extremely lucky that I caught it early enough that it hasn’t spread to any other organs in my body, and I’m even luckier that I have the best support crew one could ever ask for,” she wrote on social media.
“But I wish I could take the pain this has caused on my loved ones away.
“Nobody ever expects it to happen to them or someone they know, but it does, and I’ve very quickly realised that my age doesn’t make me invincible.”
Ms Hinton was due to fly to Los Angeles on February 28 but now makes weekly trips to Tweed Hospital for chemotherapy.
She said her career is currently on hold as she battles the “big C”.
“It didn’t quite sink in straight away … it wasn’t until we actually sat down with the oncologist and went through the treatment plan that I actually was like ‘oh okay this is the big C’,” she said.
“No one is educated at school … you’re not actually told that this is a potential thing.
“(Cancer) can happen to anyone, there is no criteria … but I think one of the hardest things about being diagnosed was not knowing what to expect after that point … not really having that information available on social media, which is the one platform that most of us all use.”
Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among women in Australia with 1 in 7 to be diagnosed in their lifetime, according to the National Breast Cancer Foundation.
The majority of breast cancer cases, about 80 per cent, occur in women over the age of 50 but breast cancer still occurs in young women with close to 1000 women under the age of 40 diagnosed each year.