Old masters, new warning
Three Kiwis have bared their bodies and souls in a bid to warn women of the importance of recognising the early signs of breast cancer. By Emily Ford and Te Ahua Maitland.
Probably best not to worry, you’re too young for breast cancer – that’s what a doctor told Anete Smith 15 years ago. She was in her 30s and had recently emigrated to New Zealand from the United Kingdom.
The Aucklander had spent the previous two weeks working up the courage to get a lump on her right breast checked out.
But that lump was something to worry about, it turns out, and had Smith accepted that doctor’s advice she might not be alive today.
Instead, she sought a second opinion and was given the news no woman wants to hear – she had breast cancer.
This month she’s one of three survivors putting their chest on display for the New Zealand Breast Cancer Foundation’s awareness campaign.
Photographed in similar poses to classic paintings by Old Masters Rubens and Rembrandt – masterpieces which experts now say featured models with clear signs of breast cancer – the models’ message is to remind women to get to know their breasts.
For Smith, getting her kit off for a recreation of Rubens’ Samson and
Delilah was a no-brainer. Years of topless sunbathing on European beaches meant she’s not fazed with showing off a little nipple – even if these days they’re not her real ones after she had a nipple reconstruction. ‘‘They’re just bosoms, for goodness’ sake.’’
Now 51, Smith’s breast cancer diagnosis is all but a distant memory. Instead of wallowing in her sadness at the time, her focus was on getting through.
Rounds of chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and a lumpectomy took over, while she and her partner poured their energy into beating the disease.
Then, six months later, at a scheduled mammogram, doctors discovered cancer in her left breast. It was a devastating blow.
‘‘I thought it was all over, but it wasn’t. I would have to go through it all over again.’’
Getting a double mastectomy was a hard decision, but one she’s pleased with – and thankful for. She’s now got a pair of ‘‘very pert bosoms’’ from the surgery.
Although it has been a decade and a half since that initial diagnosis and although Smith is confident her cancer battle is over, she’s still very proactive in the community.
She’s involved with Breast Cancer Foundation appeals and belongs to a breast cancer survivors’ dragon-boating team. It’s her reminder that plenty of women fight the disease and win.
With a background in arts, being part of the campaign was an opportunity she couldn’t say no to. And she wants to show other women that breast cancer is very survivable.
‘‘If you’re a woman and you’ve got breasts it seems to be a possibility unfortunately. I think there’s a lot of women who don’t want to know the answer, which is understandable, but it’s so much worse if you don’t get it sorted straight away.’’
The answer doesn’t always have to be death. She’s living proof of that. T he earlier you detect breast cancer, the better, the Breast Cancer Foundation says. Each October it sends teams of volunteers around the country, collecting donations in return for a pink ribbon, the international breast cancer symbol.
This year’s appeal is designed to highlight the fact it’s a manageable disease which plenty of women survive, foundation chief executive Evangelia Henderson says.
Providing, that is, it’s caught early and women recognise the dimpling, puckering, rashes, inverted nipples, and lumps that are obvious visual cues of a breast affected by cancer.
It’s not the first year the organisation has used bare breasts for one of its campaigns and the images can be confrontational. Three years ago a television ad was taken down after attracting complaints.
However, that time, the public response in support of the ad was overwhelming, Henderson says. She understands images of breasts can be controversial, but it’s more about education than anything.
Even this year’s campaign had push-back from one women’s magazine about showing nipples after the Breast Cancer Foundation decided to tread carefully and ask media whether they were fine publishing the photos.
‘‘We don’t do it to be confronting, we do it to make the public aware. We’re not looking for a reaction,’’ Henderson says.
Raising awareness of breast cancer is always going to be important, she says, and women should know what their normal looks and feels like. B reast cancer’s always been on Shona Kelway’s radar. Her older sister battled it more than 17 years ago and Kelway had a benign lump removed when she was younger.
Annual mammograms and checking her breasts have been part and parcel for the 54-year-old mother and grandmother. So, when the Pukekohe woman found a lump in her breast in July last year she was in her GP’s office three days later and referred straight away for more testing.
At Manukau SuperClinic later that afternoon, she wasn’t prepared to be told there and then that she had cancer in both of her breasts.
‘‘I didn’t even take a support person with me. I thought I was just going for a mammogram.’’
Six weeks later she had a double mastectomy and nearly a year on she has completed chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments.
With only a bit more surgery still to go through, she’s finally feeling like herself again ... albeit a tired version.
‘‘For a wee while I thought ‘do I just forget about breast cancer and go forward with my life as it was before?’ But these past few weeks I’ve realised I want to do more to help others.’’
If it wasn’t for her family and friends rallying around her, she might not have got through the past year, and she counts herself lucky for her husband, children, and grandchildren.
They kept her fed, her house cleaned, and reminded her what she was fighting for. ‘‘It makes you focus on how fragile life is. You do think about death, we’re all going to die one day, but I don’t want to die just yet.’’
Featuring as one of the Breast Cancer Foundation’s models isn’t about her, she says, it is about her family, and so she wouldn’t do it without their approval.
She and her husband discussed it – was she sure she wanted to bare all? Yes, she decided, if it could help other women be confronted to get their own breasts checked. ‘‘I hope so, otherwise I will have been naked for nothing. It’s all about catching it before it kills you.’’ A lthough it’s more likely to affect women the older they get, there’s still an increasing number of young women affected by breast cancer, such as Hamilton mother Kelly McDiarmid – the third of this October campaign’s masterpiece models.
Like Smith, doctors told the 37-year-old she was too young to have breast cancer. But wanting to be safe rather than sorry, she went for more tests.
Unlike Smith and Kelway, she opted not to get breast reconstruction surgery when she had her double mastectomy.
It didn’t bother her, running is now a lot easier, and she was more than happy to show her chest off for the breast cancer awareness campaign.
Although the death rate has reduced by 40 per cent in the past 20 years, there’s still no cure for breast cancer, which kills about 600 New Zealand women a year.
A lot of the progress in survival rates can be attributed to screening programmes and treatments, Henderson says.
More than 3300 women and 25 men are diagnosed with breast cancer every year.
Of those whose cancer is detected by mammogram, 92 per cent will likely survive past 10 years. That number drops to 75 per cent if it’s found through a lump.
Henderson would like to see improved detection options for women which are easier, cheaper, less traumatic, and not so much of a hassle. She also wants better, targeted treatments so women don’t have to go through chemotherapy, which essentially kills off living cells.
‘‘It’s very much a scattergun approach and we need more of a rifle approach that targets very specifically to kill the cancer cells.’’
Progress is being made but science is nowhere near those breakthroughs yet, she says, and a cure is still a long way off.
At the moment, the goal is to continue managing breast cancer, as well as medical research, she says, both key funding strategies of the foundation.
I think there’s a lot of women who don’t want to know the answer, which is understandable, but it’s so much worse if you don’t get it sorted straight away. Anete Smith