In May 2022, life was good for Leanne. She was 38, ‘textbook healthy’: active, eating a good-ish diet, getting good-ish sleep, exercising regularly and hadn’t even had COVID. Cancer wasn’t something on her radar.
While showering after a gym session, she felt a lump just to the left of her right underarm. At first, she dismissed it. “I thought it was a stubborn cyst,” she says. “I’d had cystic acne before and thought it’d settle after three to five weeks. It didn’t.” Six weeks later, the lump was still there. She booked an appointment with her GP—a decision that would change everything.
A contrast mammogram, ultrasound and biopsies followed. During her biopsy appointment, while still lying half-dressed and bleeding from the procedure, the radiologist looked down his microscope and delivered the news: “I’m 99.99% sure it’s breast cancer, but I hope I’m wrong. Get dressed and call your GP. Good luck.” Then he left the room.
The sonographer stood there, white as a sheet. Leanne wasn’t sure who was more shocked. After a few seconds of frozen silence, the sonographer shifted into ‘saviour mode’ helping her clean up, handing over a list of breast surgeons, ushering her out, and wishing her “good luck” once more on the way out.
It was triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), something Leanne had never heard of until that day. “I thought breast cancer was just… breast cancer,” she says. “One type. One treatment.” But TNBC is different: more aggressive, more likely to spread, and with fewer treatment options. As Leanne now describes it “TNBC is cancer’s wild card.”
Her tumour was 12mm. Just over the line where “full treatment” is recommended. That meant 20 weeks of chemotherapy, a lumpectomy, and 36 rounds of radiation. “Normally it’s 24, but because I was under 40, I got the bonus 12. Like a loyalty card: buy one tumour, get 12 burns free.”
The month that followed her diagnosis was a whirlwind: GP, breast surgeon, fertility specialist, oncologist, egg retrieval, port insertion, first chemo session, all within about four weeks. “It was overwhelming,” she says. “Needles, scans, paperwork. Every checklist item seemed to involve a needle.”
Chemo was brutal, but it wasn’t even the hardest part. Losing her hair hit her harder than she expected. Coming from a family where thick hair was practically a birthright, the emotional impact was enormous. “You don’t realise how much of your identity is tied to hair until it’s gone,” Leanne says. Hair, eyebrows, eyelashes all fell away.
She wore scarves, not wigs, and tried to avoid mirrors. She slept in disposable shower caps to catch the shedding hair (“Top tip: don’t even look inside. Just throw it away.”) Eyelashes and eyebrows clung on longer, but eventually abandoned ship too, some even falling out on the day she received her post-surgery results.
Despite everything, Leanne kept moving. Some days it was a short walk to the end of the street. Some days to the post box. “Movement saved me,” she says. It became a way to push back against the feeling that cancer was taking everything.
Her Sydney “village”—family, cousins, friends—carried her through the worst moments. Support came in meals left at the door, lifts to chemo, silent company when she couldn’t speak. It came in texts, hugs, and the simple act of not being left to sit alone in the hardest parts.
The medical system handled the treatment side well. Her breast care nurse and chemo nurses took the lead, and Leanne quickly learned to say yes to whatever they suggested. “If they said jump 10 times, I said yes ma’am. This was not my domain.”
The hard parts weren’t always medical. Therapy, finances, identity: those were the battles Leanne had to face largely on her own. “Cancer is very isolating,” she says. “Fatigue is not your friend.”
But she made it through treatment. And despite everything cancer took—her hair, energy, plans, and certainty—it didn’t take her ability to laugh when crying felt too exhausting. It didn’t take away her resilience, or her deep stubbornness to keep living, even when the road ahead looked nothing like what she had planned.
There’s no clean ending. No neat bow tied around the experience. But there is life. Leanne is still here; walking, moving, laughing (with occasional sarcasm) and refusing to let cancer define her.
Because while cancer changed her, it didn’t get the last word.
