Tanya Spink

The night I was diagnosed, I made a decision

When I got home from the hospital the night of the diagnosis, I knew only two things: 1. I had breast cancer. 2. Treatment had come a long way in the past 5 years and so the odds of survival were in my favour.

Still, I did not know whether there were more than two tumours, whether they were in one breast or both, what stage I was, what grade the tumours were, if cancer had spread to my lymph nodes, or if it had metastasised (in fact I didn’t even know this word yet)…

It was a lot to take in. My husband Andy was away in America and so my brother took my kids to his  house so that I could be alone and process.

For a split second that night as I was getting ready for bed, I wondered if I was going to die from this and whether I would still be here at Christmas-time.

With that sickening thought came an immediate sense of guilt…if I died, I was going to ruin, or at least irrevocably change the trajectory of my kids’ lives. Their safe, cosy, fun-filled lives would be turned upside down and they would go through the most bone-deep grief that they could still feel decades later.

I knew this because this is what happened to me after I lost my dad at a young age to a terminal illness.

I think I allowed myself about 30 seconds to feel that extreme fear/pain/guilt/loss/grief…and then I made a decision.

I knew that I needed to look after my mind as deliberately as the doctors would look after my body. I couldn’t stop fear from appearing, and I certainly couldn’t guarantee what happened next, but I could try to stop it from becoming the only or the loudest voice in the room.

I couldn’t let that happen.

I wouldn’t let that happen.

At least if I could help it.

Cancer may eventually take me down, but it was going to come to know  that it had chosen the wrong one to play with.

The diagnosis would be a fact of my life, but it would not become its organising principle. Cancer could occupy my body for a time, but it was not going to colonise my identity, my family or the way my kids remembered this period of their lives.

I had my kids watching me, and children absorb far more from how we inhabit a crisis than from anything we formally tell them about resilience. I couldn’t prevent them from having a mum with cancer, but I could influence what that experience looked and felt like around them. I wanted them to see that even when you have very little control over what has happened, you still retain some authorship over how you respond to it. If it eventually didn't go my way, at least this would be my legacy.

Life/Lemons/Lemonade.

So, that first night, I decided I would do cancer my way.

This wasn’t about being relentlessly positive, denying fear or pretending that serious illness could be defeated by a good attitude. I have far too much respect for science, medicine and the indiscriminate nature of disease to believe that.

Nor do I believe that survival is a reward for those who “fight” the hardest. There were tears and fear and exhaustion all the way through this…and there are friends and family facing far more gruelling diagnoses and treatments than mine, who have summoned every resource available to them. None of us earns or fails to earn an outcome by how bravely we perform cancer. If only...

For me, it was about finding agency wherever I could. I would comply with the medicine, but I did not have to comply with the conventional script of how a cancer patient was supposed to look, behave or feel.

So, I approached the biopsies, hookwire procedures, needles, scans, surgeries and radiation as I would a dental appointment. I didn’t particularly want any of it, but anticipatory panic wasn’t going to make it disappear. I would turn up, close my eyes, regulate my nervous system, practice the Vedic meditation  I had been doing for 5 years, and let all the skilled medical people do what they had trained to do. I would surrender to that. 

Sometimes I took my daughter’s squishies (it’s a thing) with me. If squeezing a small, absurdly soft toy helped me  while somebody inserted multiple needles and/or a hook and then a wire into my breast, then my dignity could survive this compromise.

Usually, my cousin Sandy would come with me to the hospital. We would make sure we loaded up with treats, listen to some 90s R&B in the car and chat about everything else besides cancer and whatever procedure or treatment was about to happen. Then afterwards we’d go for a choc-chip muffin and hot chocolate and chat about everything else besides cancer and whatever procedure or treatment had just happened.

Strategic denial. Compartmentalisation. Queen of avoidance. Whatever. It helped me sleep at night, and Sandy understood exactly how I needed the game to be played.

Other times Andy would come with me. He carried the weight of it differently. More seriously (probably fair). While I was busy pretending I was heading to an inconvenient dental appointment, he retained a much firmer grasp on reality. Unfortunately for him, reality was not invited. So, he was therefore “gently” instructed to participate in the 90s R&B, hot chocolate and complete oblivion strategy until further notice.

I hired a limousine to take me to my first surgery and sang karaoke on the way to hospital and listened to the Rocky soundtrack (“It ain’t about how hard you can hit…it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward”). This was partly because my cousin in Melbourne had convinced me that hiring a limousine for surgery was a longstanding family tradition. It wasn't, but by the time I discovered that, I had already decided it was an excellent idea.

My children were mortified rather than impressed, which was disappointing but again, whatever. At least in my mind, it wasn’t surgery day. It was limo day. (Extra points for embarrassing my brother who is a nurse at that hospital.)

My friend Anthony drove me to my next surgery in a 1967 Cobra convertible. I was absolutely freezing on the freeway, but exhilarated enough that I arrived at hospital pumped and ready for what came next. The drive didn’t change the need for surgery, but it changed the emotional architecture of the day.

Curiosity helped enormously. I became fascinated (or at least tricked myself into pretending to be fascinated) by the medicine, the machinery and the extraordinary technology being used to treat me. Turning an experience into something I could examine made it feel less like something being done to me and more like something I was intrigued by.

Every time the radiation machine whizzed past my face I would wink and thank that big bastard of a machine for saving my life.

Breathwork also turned out to be unexpectedly practical. During radiation treatment for breast cancer, patients are asked to take and hold a deep breath because it moves the heart further away from the radiation field, helping protect it from unnecessary exposure.

After five years of Vedic meditation and breathwork, this felt like a challenge I was unusually well prepared for. Naturally, it also became a competition with myself. I officially held my breath for two minutes during my practice session, then four minutes on a radiation therapist's iPhone stopwatch. I asked if I'd set a record. "Probably," she murmured. Even during radiation, I found a way to become an overachiever (they were even less enthusiastic about my proposal for a leaderboard).

I also understood that clothes, music and theatre could be forms of psychological armour. I wore t-shirts with images of people whose qualities I wanted to summon. Dennis Rodman for his grit, ridiculousness and refusal to waste energy wishing he had a different role on the court and just getting on with the job in front of him (look at me with my sport references! Who saw this coming?! 🏀) . Prince for being unconventional and entirely unwilling to make himself smaller for the comfort of others 🎼🎸. Sade simply because it was a cool t-shirt.

Even the tattoos needed to line me up every day under te radiation machine will not remain as such. I’ll incorporate them into tattoos of my own choosing. It’s a small act, but an important one. Those marks are on my body, so I will decide what they come to mean. Or I’ll get them lasered off if I can’t commit to an image. Also entirely possible

Sometimes strength was breathwork and disciplined calm. Sometimes it was intellectual curiosity. Sometimes it was tears and fear and getting up the next morning to do school drop off and then go to work anyway. Sometimes it was a squishy borrowed from my daughter. Sometimes it was Dennis Rodman,  a deeply impractical luxury sportscar and two embarrassed kids wondering why their mum could never do anything normally.

But it’s exactly because they were watching.

I hope what they saw was that courage doesn’t require an absence of fear, nor does it require you to become somebody else. Sometimes it is the decision to bring even more of yourself to the experience.

All my theatre and carefully constructed oblivion helped me retain a sense of agency, but none of it could have treated the cancer. I was carried through this by scientific knowledge, medical skill, technology, care and the work of people who have spent their lives making survival possible.

I got to do cancer my way because that knowledge and care existed around me.

That is part of why I’m fundraising now. Passing some of that forward means that someone else receiving the same incomprehensible news might also have access to the medicine, support and possibility they need to find their own way through. 

...and to those still in the thick of it, you have all my love xoxox 

Dense Breasts, It Turns Out, Aren’t a Compliment

I was diagnosed with breast cancer in April this year.

When I was given the diagnosis, it took me a little while to understand that this was, in fact, what I was being told. I had rather cheerfully, and perhaps a little too full of myself, mistaken the issue of “dense breasts” as having impressively perky and firm breasts. So deluded. 🤦🏽‍♀️After two children, I had taken it as a compliment.

It was not a compliment.

Once the breast physician clarified the situation and my ego quietly left the room, a sentence arrived that divided my life into a before and an after.

Since then, I’ve had two surgeries, 15 rounds of radiation, and more scans, tests and appointments than I care to count. I’ve also had the strange experience of placing my body and my future into the hands of people I had never met before.

And those people held me.

I’ve had world-class medical care, a brilliant breast care nurse through the McGrath Foundation, and support from organisations such as Breast Cancer Care WA and the Solaris Cancer Care Centre. Research gave my doctors better treatments. Support services helped me find my way through them. The health system, brought to life by thousands of individual human beings, gave me a future.

I was lucky enough to ring the bell at the end of treatment earlier this month. Now, in October, I’m walking 58 kilometres for the 58 Australians diagnosed with breast cancer every day.

I’m still recovering, so 58 kilometres feels both slightly ambitious and exactly right. It’s a way of rebuilding my strength while raising money for the research, prevention programs and support services that become very real, very quickly, when cancer enters your life.

If you’d like to support me, I would be enormously grateful. Every donation, whatever the amount, becomes part of what carries the next person through. And that’s what this is all about for me… 

For me, this is about passing forward some of what carried me. I have been extraordinarily fortunate, in my prognosis, in the treatment available to me and in the people and services that gathered around me when I needed them. I’m deeply grateful to be here, recovering, rebuilding and able to keep going. Now I want to help make sure the next person is carried too.