North Shore Times (New Zealand)
Swimmer’s fits signal cancer
On Christmas Eve last year, Amy Tinneny-Phillips slipped into her first seizure.
Then 28, she was in the back seat of a car on the way to Raglan, with her mum driving and her aunt in the passenger’s seat.
As her aunt changed the CD, she heard Tinneny-Phillips make a noise behind her - ’’If you don’t like my choice of music, just say so,’’ she said.
When she turned around, she found her niece in the throws of a grand mal seizure.
Tinneny-Phillips had been feeling run down for months, experiencing migraines and fainting spells.
But, as the Orewa resident continued to have seizures over the summer months, it became clear something was very wrong.
In March, she went for an MRI. The scans revealed a large tumour sitting on the right side of her brain.
Tinneny-Phillips was training to be an osteopath within the aquatic industry. A keen swimmer, she had just got a job working in the pool with children when the seizures began.
Before her diagnosis, she spent six days of the week in the water. She hasn’t been in once since April, when she had brain surgery to remove the majority of her tumour.
Now 29, study, work and life have been put on hold, as she battles the cancer.
Tinneny-Phillips has completed a course of radiation therapy and is undergoing oral chemotherapy until December to continue to remove what is left of the tumour
The side effects have left her unable to drive, but she has been making use of the Cancer Society’s volunteer driver service to get around.
She also attends the Society’s monthly programme in Glenfield for North Shore cancer patients and their supporters.
Run by nurses and psychologists, the programme teaches coping strategies and gives people opportunities to meet others affected by cancer.
Despite finding very few people her age at the meetings and in hospital waiting rooms, she found the experiences ‘‘strangely uniting’’.
‘‘That’s the thing with cancer,’’ Tinneny-Phillips said. ‘‘It doesn’t care about your age or what race you are, so you click with anyone you’re sitting next to … You kind of just share your battle wounds and your stories.’’