WHY MUM’S THE WORD
For the first time this Currumbin local and mum can celebrate Mother’s Day with her miracle baby Charlie … thanks to her own mother’s intuition, which saved her life from a serious brush with cancer five years ago
It’s hard to overstate the meaning of Mother’s Day for Briony Benjamin. Not only will this weekend be the first time she can celebrate with her own miracle baby, but it was the intuition of her own mother which saved her life and made this maternal dream come true. Six years ago, the then-31year-old found out she had stage four Hodgkin’s lymphoma, with cancer riddled throughout her chest and bones.
She was given just two weeks to freeze her eggs before beginning an intense course of chemotherapy at Gold Coast University Hospital, which would likely damage if not destroy her fertility.
While Briony lost her hair and her then-boyfriend, she never lost hope.
And five years to the week when she first reached remission, she discovered that she and partner Byron Fay were pregnant … naturally.
Now, seven months after little Charlie was born, Briony is celebrating her new life as a mother. And she has her own mother to thank.
Raised on the Gold Coast, where she returned after her diagnosis, Briony had moved to Sydney years ago to pursue a career in media when she started feeling unwell.
“I was working at Mamma Mia and for about 18 months I just was not feeling right,” said Briony.
“I was getting sick easily, I was exhausted all the time and I had night sweats on and off. I went to the doctor again and again but there was never an answer other than my inflammatory markers were up. I went to three different GPS but they all just said it’s stress, to learn to meditate.
“It got to the point where I thought, well, maybe this is just what being an adult is like?
“My mother was always on my case, she just knew something was off, and my father is a veterinarian … so, unbeknown to me, they called my GP and said they were really worried that I had a blood cancer and could I be sent to a haematologist.
“On the day that I had to go back for my results, Mum insisted that she fly down from the Gold Coast to be with me. She just knew.
“So I sat down in the office and the doctor said it was Hodgkin’s lymphoma, just like my parents thought.
“Thank goodness they didn’t show me the scans because it was everywhere. It was as bad as it could be.”
From that moment, everything changed. Briony not only had to cancel her work plans for that day, but was told to clear her schedule for the next six months.
She was also advised that if she wanted to consider having children in the future, she should immediately freeze her eggs. Suddenly, her life was filled with life-altering decisions.
“I couldn’t grasp it all at first, I think it’s when they said I would lose my hair that I started to understand that this was ‘cancer’ cancer,” she said.
“I was in a relationship at the time and it was incredibly challenging to think about whether I should freeze just my eggs or embryos as well? Did we even want to have kids together?
“Normally you would take months for this process but I only had two weeks until the chemo started. The gynaecologist was great and just said the most important thing was that I get into treatment and come out alive on the other side, any eggs were a bonus.
“We decided that if they could retrieve more than 15 eggs we would create some embryos and they ended up retrieving 30. Normally they wouldn’t take that many but these were extreme circumstances.
“When I woke up and they told me, I immediately felt I’d made the wrong decision about the embryos. And when I finished chemo, that relationship ended as well.
“But I’ve made peace with that decision, I made the best choice that I could at the time in that pressure-cooker situation.”
Throughout her chemo course, which started the day after the fertility treatment finished, Briony was buoyed not just by her mother, friends and family, but some amazing women specialists at the Gold Coast University Hospital.
And as she navigated the worst fallout from the treatment, she found strength not just in her positive results but in sharing her experience.
“I was so lucky to have two female specialists who were up to date on every bit of research coming out. I’m now an ambassador for the Leukaemia Foundation and one of the goals I’m working towards is to have a national standard for treatment like there is for breast cancer.
“Right now, it can be hit or miss depending on where you live and what hospital you attend. Your postcode should not determine your survival.
“Thanks to those women, my 18-week chemo course turned into just 12 weeks because my response was so great. That was good news for my prognosis and also my future fertility.
“I was in remission by the end of treatment, which was wonderful, but then my hair loss started. You almost feel guilty for being sad about it, like there are such bigger issues at stake, but it’s a real marker that you are ‘sick’, and for me, my hair was such a big part of my look and identity.
“I was so lucky that one of my friends rang a cancer hotline and was given some guidance on how to handle this. So when my hair started falling out, he said he would mourn the loss of my hair with me, that my sadness was valid and we didn’t need to make jokes about it.
“That I could be sad and he would be sad for me.
“Then another friend said to me, let’s reframe this and see the hair loss as proof of how well the chemo is working. Between my friends and family, I started to feel okay about it all. I realised this was manageable, I just looked different. A few weeks into it, I embraced it … it felt good in a way to be stripped back to the rawest version of myself.
“My friends encouraged me to document my experience and so we made a little video, which people really responded to. Then a publisher reached out and suddenly I was writing a book.”
That book became the acclaimed ‘Life is Tough But So Are You’, a guide to rising to the challenge when things go pearshaped.
Fortunately for Briony, her next big surprise in life was something wonderful, when a breakfast disaster turned into a triumph of the body.
“Byron cooked me eggs one morning and ugh, I just couldn’t look at them,” she said.
“We both thought, well, that’s weird. So I took a pregnancy test … and I was pregnant. Naturally.
“It was such a shock to us. I was sure it was going to be really hard, if not impossible. Doctors had said I could try naturally and if no luck, I would use my frozen eggs. So we started early, assuming it would be a long journey, but it happened immediately.
“We found out on the same week that I hit five years cancerfree, which is a huge milestone. It was equal parts awe and gratitude and shock and overwhelm … we decided to move home to the Gold Coast permanently so we could be near family, and I can say that my mother was born to be a grandmother. And I love being a mother, Charlie is just the happiest baby.
“I’m so incredibly fortunate to have survived, to have had a child, to have a wonderful partner and brilliant family and friends. It didn’t take cancer to realise all of that, but it sure makes you remember it.”
Now enjoying every moment with seven-month-old Charlie, Briony said she was loving living back on the Coast.
While she said she was concentrating on being a fulltime mother for now, she was also focused on encouraging women to trust their intuition, especially when it came to their health.
“I grew up in Mudgeeraba so it’s great being back in my home town. One of my biggest takeaways from this cancer experience has been that your community is everything, and we’ve found a fantastic community back here,” she said.
“As soon as we moved in, we had neighbours bring us a box of fresh produce and put a little stork in our yard when we had Charlie, it’s been amazing.
“I really want to work on giving back too, not just in this city but for all women.
“After my mother intervened and I was finally sent off for scans and a biopsy, that was the first time my pain was taken seriously.
“When I explained about my night sweats and the pain in my neck, the response was, ‘Oh wow, this is having a big effect on your life.’ It was such a relief to finally have my experience validated.
“GPS are used to seeing the worried well, but you are the only one who knows your body and how it feels. Unfortunately, it’s very common that what ends up being cancer is at first put down to periods.
“Women have to be proactive, because too often their symptoms are ignored. One woman told me she had a tumour so large it collapsed her lung but the doctor kept telling her she was just anxious.
“It’s not fair we have to fight to be heard, but make a noise for your life’s sake.”
As a new mother and grateful daughter, this Mother’s Day is undeniably a special day
But for Briony, it’s also the same as every other day – a gift.
incredibl“
I’m so y fortunate to have survived, to have had a child, to have a wonderful partner and brilliant family and friends
Briony Benjamin