‘I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me’
Exactly a year ago, designer Helen Cody was diagnosed with breast cancer. After a year of treatment, including a double mastectomy, she feels ‘lucky’, writes Emily Hourican
‘IFEEL like it was an out-of-body experience at this point, because I feel so well, so strong.” So says designer Helen Cody about what she dubs “2018, the cancer year”. We are sitting in the light-filled kitchen of her city centre home, with two small dogs, Helen’s “personal trainers”. And indeed, barely two months after finishing treatment, she has a remarkable serenity and a glow to her.
“I’m walking four or five kilometres every day,” she says. “It’s quite meditative to do that in the morning. It’s a brisk walk, I build up a sweat. The dogs get great exercise, I get time to think and to process everything that goes on in my life. So by the time I get to my studio, I’m completely on it. It’s just very therapeutic. It’s very simple, not complicated.”
Simple, not complicated, is very much what Helen aims for these days. And no wonder. This time last year she went for a mammogram. “I discovered a lump in my right breast. I was convinced it was just a lumpy breast.” However, her partner (now husband), architect Rory Murphy, “was convinced it was something sinister. So I thought, I’ll go and get checked and it will all be grand. Two years ago, I had a lump looked at, in St Vincent’s, and I had a mammogram and an ultrasound, and I was told there was nothing wrong with me. So this time, I went for the mammogram, and nothing came up. But because there was a palpable lump, I had to go into Breast Check, where they did another mammogram, and still nothing came up. Then I had the ultrasound, and an MRI, and I was told I had a sizeable tumour at the top of my breast.”
She pauses to say: “Some cancers will manifest as breast tissue — they’ll camouflage themselves. Which means it is so important to check your breasts and not just rely on mammograms.” Like any screening programme, as we now know, Helen says, “the mammogram is not foolproof — you have to be super-vigilant”.
That was late January, and the news just kept getting worse. “I was trying to get used to the idea that I had cancer in one breast, and within half an hour I was told that I had it in both breasts and would need a double mastectomy. To get that information at that speed, it was like bullets,” she says. “It was like being shot. I went into shock and started to shake. I couldn’t cope, it was all coming at me too quickly. I had no time to catch up.”
More bad news followed. “It was in the lymph nodes too. January and February were just horrendous, to the point that when I got the results of my CT scan, in March, I went from being absolutely devastated that I had cancer to celebrating wildly with Rory that I didn’t have it in my bones.”
A date for surgery was set, and “in the middle of it all,” Helen says with a laugh, “my fabulous Rory decided to distract me, which was brilliant. He proposed on Sandymount beach in February, and we got married three weeks later, to the day.” They had been together five years at that stage, in a relationship that Helen describes as “a very rare thing. I don’t want to sound smug, or twee, but I’m very lucky. He is the kindest man I’ve ever met. Talk about testing your vows,” she continues. “He was incredible throughout. He didn’t miss one appointment, he was at every chemo session. He never let me down, not for a second. Meanwhile, he was also working, running the house, doing groceries. It was a very tough year for him, on loads of levels, and he came out of it as a knight in shining armour.”
Of the wedding, she says: “It was brilliant. At this stage of our lives — I’m 53 now — it was OK to speed through it all. We made four phone calls. We got City Hall, and they said I could have my dogs give me away. Rory’s two daughters were my flower girls, his son was his best man. It was very intimate and very small, only 30 people; our best and dearest friends. It was very simple, very lovely, the most beautiful, special, easy day.”
And it was, she says “a lovely distraction. Never were vows thought about more deeply. I knew I had surgery coming, I had this crazy notion that I’d die. I made a will. Cancer does make you go there,” she says. “You can’t not think about death.”
Helen and Rory married on March 20, and surgery took place on the 28th. “My honeymoon was in Vincent’s,” she says, with half a laugh.
The hardest thing, at that stage, “was getting my head around the fact that both my breasts were going. Everyone is different, but for me, they were very much a part of my sexuality, of who I am, of how I presented myself to the world. They were this fundamental expression of my femininity.”
Anyone looking at Helen’s designs will know that she is a deeply romantic, feminine person; “Absolutely,” she agrees, “and surgery like that, your whole identity suffers. I was in love, I was just married. Suddenly I’m looking at this huge change, physically.”
However, once she came to terms with the necessity, Helen found her own, very unique, way through. “Once I got my head around it, I began to look at it as constructing a dress,” she says. “Reconstructing my body — how are we going to do this? How are we going to stitch my skin together so it doesn’t scar…? My surgeon and I ended up having these really interesting conversations; I looked at her drawings and made suggestions about how it could be done. I had to objectify it — it was the only way I could deal with what was happening.”
And? “I have to hand it to my surgeon,” Helen laughs, “she could come and work in my atelier! The scars have nearly disappeared.”
Surgery was six hours — “I woke up absolutely delighted to be alive,” she says “and knowing I didn’t have cancer; it was gone. That euphoria, coupled with a lot of morphine, carried me through the pain afterwards, and through the six-week gap before I started chemo.”
Chemo, for Helen, turned out to be “horrific. It just really got me. I found it really, really tough.” First, she was given an injection of Neulasta, a drug given to stimulate the white blood cell count and boost the immune system. “I became so sick that I ended up back in hospital. I had bone pain like I have never imagined in my life. I ended up on a drip, with morphine. I had a massive allergic reaction, so that was the end of that. Which meant my immune system was hugely compromised for the remainder of the treatments.”
Helen’s response was to take charge. “I kept myself at home, away from people. You have to mind yourself, and be incredibly focussed. It was like a job! I had to think about food, my diet. It was hugely important for me to maintain a very positive, healthy approach. That was my way of fighting it. Of not letting it swallow me completely, because when chemo takes over, it’s daunting and exhausting, but the minute I felt a little bit better, it was up, out, walking, juicing, and I kept myself well and I didn’t get any infections.”
She also took the help that was