I’m living with cancer rather than dying of it
IN the months after giving birth to her healthy little boy, new mum Sian Hopkin was told she had incurable stage four secondary breast cancer.
Her doctor couldn’t give her a prognosis, saying statistics showed she would have three to five years left to live, but that he has seen some women follow treatment for 10 years.
Sian, from Salford, initially felt overwhelmed with guilt for bringing her newborn into the world that she will sadly leave too early.
But now she says she’s learnt to live with her cancer, rather than feel she’s dying from it.
After giving birth in February last year, the 38-year-old was visited by a midwife the next day for a routine examination.
The midwife spotted a lump on Sian’s breast, and put it down as being a blocked milk duct from breastfeeding.
Sian noticed the lump became more prominent over the following three months.
Concerned, she visited her GP who assured her that she believed it to be a benign cyst, but urgently referred her to be on the safe side.
What followed next was a spiral of devastating diagnoses.
“I had never noticed the lump because my boobs are large anyway and they’d swollen so much during pregnancy,” Sian said.
“It was only as they started to shrink back a bit and it had grown that it became more apparent.
“It’s a lot harder to check your boobs for lumps during pregnancy. They’re often sore and tender, so you don’t really want to go prodding at that point.”
Sian, who lives with her partner Dave in Worsley, said during the two-week wait for her ultrasound appointment, she wasn’t too worried.
However when doctors were unsure of the results, they carried out a mammogram, which came back inconclusive, so Sian then had to have a biopsy.
“The fear kicked in at this point; everything got a lot more real,” Sian said. “I had to wait a week for the results which was horrendous.”
While Sian was fortunate to not have her appointments delayed with the NHS due to the impact of coronavirus, she had to attend the hospital alone to hear the outcome.
“It came back that it was cancer,” she said. “The first question they [the doctor and nurse] asked was ‘is anyone with you?’ At which point then you know the way the conversation is going to go.
“On the drive home, I kept replaying how I was going to tell my partner, who had been waiting for the results with a bottle of bubbly in the fridge ready, hoping it was good news. “As soon as he saw my face, he knew then it wasn’t.”
Sian had a mastectomy booked in for a month later. She was coping well at this point, having spoken to a few friends who had gone through a similar experience, but then the secondary diagnosis hit three weeks later.
Due to the size of Sian’s lump, at 11cm, doctors, who initially diagnosed her as stage two, had requested further CT scans and bone MRIs, referring her to an oncologist. The mastectomy surgery that she had been looking forward to was cancelled following new results. They revealed it had spread to her bones, and that it was in fact at stage four, incurable “That was the killer,” Sian said. “When you get that stage four diagnosis, you’re then thinking how long are you actually going to be there to see them grow up. From a selfish point of view, you want to be there to see it and from their point of view, no one wants to be left without a parent.”
Sian went through two rounds of chemo in August last year, but by September, they discovered the treatment had failed, and that the cancer had spread to her liver.
While tests now show her tumours are shrinking, Sian is on treatment for life, taking daily tablets and enduring monthly injections, which cause her to feel tired, run-down, with achy joints.
She’s also due to have a double mastectomy in a fortnight.
“Often the question you get is when will treatment finish, but for us, it never will,” Sian said.
She has found solace with Facebook support groups, and has met up with women in her village after meeting them online.
They led her to taking part in this year’s ‘Maggie’s on the Runway’ - a charity fashion show at Manchester Airport yesterday in support of Maggie’s Manchester, a charity providing free support and information to people living with cancer.
She added: “When you first get diagnosed, all you’ve got is stats, which aren’t good, so once I found the groups, I was able to see that people are living with this, and you have got ladies who have been on treatment for 10 to 15 years.
“My cancer was the first and last thing I would think about each day. But I can now honestly say that I am living with cancer rather than dying of it.”
Mum was told she was incurable just months after giving birth to baby son, writes Saffron Otter