‘My family’s love helps me fight’
After surviving cancer, Franki wants to make her loved ones proud
It’s not every day you’re given a second chance at life and Francesca Hudson isn’t going to waste hers. The 20-year-old is determined to make the most of every moment after overcoming thyroid cancer in January 2018.
But for Franki, being cancerfree is especially significant as she lost her dad and two sisters to the disease when they were all shockingly young. Rick was 40, Talya 28 and Bridgette just one when she passed away.
“I push myself every day to make sure I’m living life to my fullest,” Francesca, known as Franki, tells Woman’s Day. “I’ve learned to enjoy every day as it comes and not think too much about the future, just live in the moment.” Franki was 17 and excited to begin her final year at school when a mass on her thyroid was found in a routine screening – one she’d had each year since testing positive to the cancer gene familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) five years earlier.
SCHOOL ON HOLD
Exams and essays were pushed aside as Franki and her mother Tiana, 47, visited Newcastle’s John Hunter Hospital, where a biopsy confirmed their worst fear – the mass was cancer.
“I didn’t cry, I just wanted to know – what’s next, what treatments we can do? I wasn’t going to give up,” says Franki.
After three months of consults with her specialist care team as they considered options, on March 26, 2018, Franki underwent surgery to remove the cancer and half of her thyroid.
Thankful for the love and support of siblings Imagen, 28, Max, 26, Bailey, 24, Dalton, 22, Mackenzie, 19, Carson, 16, and Clayton, 14, Franki credits them for helping her smile on her toughest days. But Franki, who spent her childhood watching her dad and siblings fight their own cancer battles, knew they would keep her strong.
“I don’t know how I would have been able to get through this without my family,” she confesses. “We’d already been through so much, and still they didn’t treat me any differently. We are so close, they’re everything to me.”
With her surgery a huge success, Franki didn’t have to undergo chemo or radiotherapy but continues to have six-monthly check-ups to monitor her condition.
Franki, who this year celebrated being three years cancer-free, is the face of Canteen’s 2021 Bandanna Day fundraising campaign. Partnering with the charity,
which raises funds to provide support for young people living with cancer and their families, the Newcastle-based student has designed a limitededition Smell the Roses bandanna to spread her message of hope.
“I made this bandanna to remind myself and everyone that life goes by too fast and that we all need to stop and smell the roses sometimes,” she explains. “When everything was changing, Canteen was a constant, they were always there for a hand to hold or someone to speak to, I really can’t thank them enough.”
And while she will need ongoing check-ups to monitor for any abnormal cells, for now Franki is determined to make the most of her future and live a life that will make her family proud.
“My dad and sisters would be incredibly proud of who
I am today,” says Franki, who is studying to be a primary school teacher.
“I’ve moved out of home, I’m studying fulltime, I’m doing everything I told them I’d do before they passed away. I’m living every day for them, too.”