My mum kicked cancer in the butt

When Kelly Reynolds was 21, she found lumps in her right breast. She was told by her GP the lumps were associated with breast feeding. Ten years later, she was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. Her daughter Jessica tells her story

It was dark by the time we were driving back to our rental house. It was 2011 and our South New Brighton home had collapsed in the earthquake earlier that year.

Mum had taken my younger sister Hayley and I to our weekly swimming lessons. Us two kids were half asleep, hair wet and stinking of chlorine, on the back seat of our Mitsubishi Outlander.

We were almost home when mum’s phone lit up the car with an incoming call.

She pulled over. She answered. She listened. And then she cried.

The call ended and our car went silent. My sister and I didn’t dare to move or speak. We didn’t need to. We looked at each other and knew something was wrong.

We got home and I couldn’t understand why mum and my dad, Lance, were both so upset. I was only 10. All I knew was that we’d just been swimming and now it was time for dinner.

My sister and I quietly waited in the living room. We could hear mum crying from across the house.

We held on to each other, not sure of what else to do.

Our dad suddenly came in.

He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then: “Mum has cancer”.

I knew cancer wasn’t good – my nana had had it twice – but I didn’t know how bad it truly was. I’d never seen my dad cry before, either, so that wasn’t a good sign.

That was the night everything changed for my family.

​My mum first felt lumps in her right breast in 2005, after having me, her first child. She knew her body would change after having children, but went to see her local GP to make sure everything was okay, just in case.

Mum’s doctor told her that because she was only 21 and breastfeeding, the lumps were likely to be enlarged milk ducts and would go away with time.

But the lumps never went away, not even after my little sister, born in 2007, grew up, too.

Every year, mum went back to her doctor to check on the lumps.

Every year he told her that because she was young, and the lumps were not fixed or painful, they were fine.

“It never crossed my mind that something was wrong, because you have to trust your doctor,” she said.

During the next 10 years, mum wasn’t concerned about the lumps at all.

“When your doctor talks, you expect what they are saying to be the truth, so I never thought it was weird to have breast lumps for so long.”

“I wasn’t concerned, either,” said dad. “Kel was always on top of her health. If something was wrong she would see her doctor and they would sort it out. She was told she was fine, so that’s what we both thought.”

Said mum: “So I continued to live my life. I watched my kids grow up, attending every school assembly, every swimming lesson and every gymnastics competition. My life went on as normal because I had no reason to believe it shouldn’t be.”

Ten years after mum first felt the lumps, her doctor’s surgery closed down and she was referred to a new GP. At mum’s first appointment with this doctor, she mentioned the lumps.

“My new doctor said, ‘Yeah, the lumps feel fine, but I want to get a biopsy. Just in case’. This new perspective changed everything.

“I had the biopsy done, and then I got a phone call. And, yeah. Everything went upside down.”

At 31-years-old, my mum was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer.

“I wasn’t angry at my GP for not testing my breast lumps sooner. That thought didn’t even occur to me until much later. When you get diagnosed with cancer, that is enough to take in. There are no afterthoughts. I was just scared,” said mum.

“The night I was diagnosed, I drove to my parent’s house and told them. It was horrible. Absolutely horrible. We had already been through my mum going through cancer, twice. It was awful telling them I had it too. We all cried.

“The day after, my kids didn’t go to school. We spent the day at home, just being together. My husband and I were both really emotional, but my girls still didn’t really understand what was going on. We had to explain what cancer was, and instantly they thought I was going to die. It wasn’t easy explaining to them that I was going to be fine, especially when I wasn’t even sure myself that I would be.”

During the first few weeks after her diagnosis, mum had a lot of appointments with her oncologist and had to make several life-changing decisions, including what kind of surgery she wanted.

“Never in my life did I think I would be sat across from someone asking whether I wanted one or two of my breasts removed,” said mum.

She decided to have a single mastectomy to remove her right breast. The surgery happened about six weeks after her diagnosis.

Mum was in hospital for about a week after her surgery.

“It was awful,” she said. “The surgery went well, but the drains were awful. Just being attached to you, draining stuff out of you. It was disgusting, I hated it, and I couldn’t leave until the drains were removed.”

Dad stayed with her as much as he could. “It broke my heart over and over again seeing her in that hospital bed.”

Hayley and I visited mum a lot, too. It was a long, long week for our family.

Once home, mum’s recovery went smoothly. She had heaps of friends and family visit, even random people from dad’s work brought her flowers.

“I was very well loved,” said mum.

But even though the surgery was over, mum’s journey was not. About six weeks later, mum was told she needed to start chemotherapy.

“I cried the hardest when I was told I would lose my hair to chemo,” said mum. “I always loved my hair, it was so long, blonde and healthy. I was still grieving the loss of my breast, so the thought of losing my hair too was devastating.”

She went through 12 weeks of chemotherapy, then six weeks of radiation.

“I got nasty burns on my boob, across my chest, and up my neck. It didn’t hurt at the time, you sat there, they zapped you for a minute, and then you left. It really hurt afterwards, though. I scarred quite badly. The scars are still there today.

“I never let my girls watch the treatment. It was not something I wanted them to see. Their dad came with me every time, though.”

Mum always felt rubbish after getting chemo. “But having my girls around made it easier because they gave me a reason to keep going, to be strong. I was always going to be there as their mum, no matter what.”

Because she was so determined to be strong for us, life appeared as normal as it could be for my sister and I during mum’s treatment. We were either at school or at someone’s house. We never knew how bad her treatment made her feel, or how sick she truly was.

That’s why I don’t think the reality of cancer fully hit me until we shaved my mum’s head.

Mum wanted to shave her head before her hair began to fall out. We left it up to her when she was ready, and I don’t think she ever truly was. But one day mum was at a cafe at The Colombo with a friend, and saw in a bathroom mirror her hair was falling out.

“I decided at that moment it was time to shave my hair,” said mum. “I wasn’t going to wait for it to start falling out in clumps. I would rather be in control of it.”

When mum got home, the four of us went into the kitchen, a pair of scissors in my dad’s hand. We all tried not to cry as dad began to cut mum’s long, blonde hair. My sister and I helped as well.

When we couldn’t cut mum’s hair any shorter, we all fell silent. There was an electric hair clipper sitting plugged in on the bench. Mum slowly reached out to grab it, and turned it on. The buzzing almost shook the house, it was so loud against our silence.

We stood together, shoulder to shoulder in a group hug that came close to breaking our family. Not once did we ever think we would have to go through this.

With a deep breath, mum raised the clipper to her head. We watched as what remained of her soft hair floated gently to the floor.

Again, we took turns. While one of us helped mum with her hair, the others held her, because this was a deeply, deeply hard moment.

“I felt so sad. Shaving my hair made cancer real,” she said.

“When you think of cancer, the first image you think of is someone with no hair. It showed the world that I was sick.”

Once mum’s hair was swept into a pile, I ran to my bedroom. Rummaging around, I found an empty old Smiggle lunch box and hurried back with it. I put mum’s hair inside and zipped it up. How could we throw away this piece of her?

Today, this lunchbox still sits in my wardrobe.

When we went to our grandparents’ house that weekend, my granddad shaved his head too, in support of his daughter.

About a year after she was first diagnosed, mum finally finished chemotherapy and was officially cancer-free. Yet, her journey was still not over. She had many reconstructive surgeries to come.

First, she had an expander put in under the skin where her breast was removed on her right side, which the doctor slowly inflated over time. After a few months, she had her left breast removed too, and had silicone implants put in.

“When I had the two implants, I felt complete again. I had them for about a year, and that year was the happiest I have been since being diagnosed with cancer. I felt like myself again,” said mum.

Unfortunately after about a year mum’s body rejected the right silicone implant, so it had to be removed and replaced. It was not long before the new implant became infected too, and mum was rushed into emergency surgery to have it removed. Her skin was so damaged they could not give her another implant. Now, she is completely flat on the right side.

“I hate having one side flat and one side not,” said mum. Then she sighed. “But at the end of the day, who really cares? I’m still here. My boobs did their job, they breastfed my girls. They helped me raise my daughters, and I can live without them now. The main thing is that I am still alive.”

This month, my mum will be 12 years cancer-free. She doesn’t know it yet, but we will be celebrating.

Cancer took so much from our family, but it didn’t take her. Today, fears of losing mum have faded away, replaced by countless memories, so much laughter, and a lifetime's worth of gratitude.

As devastating as it was to hear, finding out mum had breast cancer meant she had a chance to fight it. Not only did she survive, but in her words, she “kicked cancer in its butt”.

“You can never be too careful, even if you’re young,” mum said. She looked at me, her now almost 21-year-old daughter, knowing that just after my birthday in September, I will be getting my first mammogram, and I will be getting one every year. My younger sister will too, eventually.

Cancer runs in our family, and even though we’re young, my sister and I know you can never be too careful, because our mum was young too.

While most cases of breast cancer occur in women over 50, around 400 New Zealand women under the age of 44 are diagnosed with breast cancer every year.

“When it comes to it, if you think something is wrong, but you’re told it’s fine, always, always, get a second opinion,” mum said, when asked the one thing she would say to every young woman if she could.

“My second opinion saved my life. It gave me the chance to fight, and almost 12 years on, I’m proud to say I’m Kelly Reynolds, a cancer survivor.”

– Jessica Reynolds is a third-year Canterbury University journalism student