Breast Cancer is the most common type of cancer for women in Ireland but it’s not as deadly as it was thanks to earlier detection and more advanced treatments.

Breast Cancer Ireland (BCI) has played a key role in raising awareness and much needed funds for research. In advance of BCI’s Great Pink Run which takes place from October 16-17, Carissa Casey talks to breast cancer survivors and BCI’s chief executive Aisling Hurley about the latest developments.

The death last month of 39-year-old Sarah Harding, former member of Girls Aloud, should serve as a wake-up call to women everywhere.

Sarah discovered lumps under her arm in December 2019, but put off seeing a doctor. When she finally did, she was told to get an MRI scan. And then the pandemic hit.

“I was aware that I needed to get this health issue sorted, but with everything that was going on, it was tough,” she wrote in her memoir. “One day I woke up realising that I’d been in denial about the whole thing.

Yes, there was a lockdown, yes, there was a pandemic, but it was almost as if I’d been using that as an excuse not to face up to the fact that something was very wrong.”

In August 2020 she announced that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and that it had spread to other parts of her body. She died on September 5 this year.

It’s beyond tragic that a disease that has such a high survival rate should claim someone so young and vibrant.

We don’t know if earlier detection and treatment might have spared Sarah’s life, but it has saved the lives of so many other women.

PATRICIA’S STORY

Patricia Creary was working as an oncology nurse at St James Hospital in Dublin when the cancer drug Herceptin was first introduced. (Herceptin is an intravenous drug that can help control the growth of certain types of cancer cells.) She was involved in the clinical trials. Ten years after working on that clinical study, Patricia found herself sitting in the reclining chair on the same ward, surrounded by her colleagues and friends, while her chemotherapy was being administered -which included Herceptin.

She burst into tears.

“I was on the other side. I was the one sitting in the patient chair. The realisation of that was hard,” she remembers.

A few months previously, she was at home one evening on her computer when she just happened to sweep her hands across her breast and found “the smallest lump”. The next day she ran the leukaemia clinic at St James and then went down to the breast clinic to ask their advice. She had a mammogram, an ultrasound and then “got a bad feeling because they wanted to do a biopsy straight away”.

She was diagnosed a week later, with a Grade 3 tumour. “I felt shock and disbelief at the start. I was such a healthy person, you feel as if your body has played a trick on you. I felt so angry.”

But the worst part emotionally was when all the treatment was over and she was cancer free. After a mastectomy, she had chemotherapy, including Herceptin. “My chemo finished in September and I turned 40 in November.

Everyone was saying, ‘Oh you did so well, it’s all over, you should be happy’ and I wasn’t at all,” she says.

By Christmas she remembers being “awful down on myself”. “It was like everything that happened only hit me at this point.”

“Even my own experience of looking after patients with breast cancer, after all the treatment and the chemo is finished and they walk out the door, it’s like, ‘Cheerio, goodbye’. The hospital only does so much for you. Then the psychological impact of it hits.”

As an oncology nurse, she found it difficult to ask for support. “I had to step out of that nurse’s role,” she says.

With hindsight, she believes she was suffering grief. “It was like stages of grief with an element of depression in that I had a very low feeling. You feel like part of your femininity has been tampered with. You do grieve that loss. That body part has been taken from you. There was some kind of violation that you had to go through. I was always a happy go lucky person and then all of sudden, this was after happening. I just didn’t know how to deal with it really.”

Claire took most of 2014 off and returned to work the following year in a nurse teaching position locally. She found it too difficult to face going back to St James, which also involved a long commute from her home in Port Laoise.

Today she is a happy, healthy 47-year-old who does the Great Pink Run every year with her family and friends.

CLAIRE’S STORY

Claire Hayden woke up one night in September 2020 with a pain in her left breast. “I was half asleep and put my hand to where the pain was and found a lump about the size of a grape.”

She was just 39 and a mum of two boys, working as a special needs assistant.

She rang her GP the next day and – because Covid restrictions were in full swing - she asked the receptionist if the doctor could call her back. Almost reluctantly she decided to mention that it was because she had found a lump on her breast. The doctor called and saw her immediately and four days later she had a triple assessment. “Was I worried? I was a bit like, ‘I’ll be glad when they tell me I’ll be grand’,” she says.

Just 38 at the time, there was no history of breast cancer in her family. She had a mammogram and went to another room for the ultrasound. She didn’t feel alarmed, thinking that the medical team were just ticking boxes. Then a doctor was bought in to repeat the ultrasound.

He asked her who had bought her to the appointment and that they should have a chat. Under repeated pressure from Claire, he eventually admitted to her that it was more than likely cancer. “I was undressed on my top half and usually I’d be very self-conscious, but I just sat up. He (the doctor) was so kind, holding my hand. He told me I was going to be okay. We went across to the other room and I made eye contact with my husband. I wasn’t there. I had left the building. I had no idea what was being said”, she recounts.

Claire was diagnosed with an invasive ductal carcinoma. It was Stage 1 but Grade 3 – the most aggressive type. But it had been caught early and her lymph nodes were clear so it hadn’t yet spread beyond the breast. She had a mastectomy followed by 18 weeks of chemotherapy. The chemo was, by far, the most challenging part of the treatment, she says. “I was in a chemo fog. I wouldn’t have the strength to answer the phone to my mother. I just couldn’t get the words out to say ‘I’m alright mam’. Then I’d start climbing out and the hardest part is you know you have to get back in the chemo hole for the next round.”

EARLY DETECTION

But Claire is now healthy and cancer free. She’s a singer and will be supporting Imelda May on her Irish tour next year.

She’s also recorded a song about the disease which she has now released as a single. “In previous generations, it was with a whisper when you said cancer. I feel totally okay talking about anything but within reason, not when I’m in the supermarket with my kids. I really do want to get the message out to other women to check themselves and follow up if they find something.”

Early detection is critical to slashing survival rates to 85 per cent in recent years, says Aisling Hurley of Breast Cancer Ireland (BCI). Mortality rates are reducing by two per cent annually. “That’s the key statistic, as it gets us closer to realising our vision of transforming this disease into a treatable illness long term,” she says.

Treatment has being transformed by a simple tissue test (Oncotype DX) which is based on a patient’s genetics and suggests a personalised treatment plan. It has meant that 50 per cent less patients diagnosed with breast cancer now require chemotherapy.

The speed of new discoveries has increased dramatically, with the BCI now funding specialist nurses in cancer centres.

They are creating a central national ‘bio bank’, so that clinicians and scientists have the full complement of patient samples at their disposal. Further new developments are in the offing, including a €6 million

Breast Cancer Research Clinical Trials Centre at Beaumont Hospital which will open in December this year.

Funds from this year’s Great Pink Run will go towards research into metastatic disease – where tumours evade traditional therapies and spread. More money will be pumped into the clinical trials at cancer centres, says Aisling.

For more about The Great Pink Run visit breastcancerireland.com

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