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“Suddenly, I started not wanting to go out. I wasn’t feeling motivated at work. I didn’t want to do my job. I was crying every day. I just didn’t want to get out of bed; I wouldn’t speak to anybody.” Iyna went to her GP and was referred to counselling. She began to change her life in small ways, including keeping a gratitude diary and attending online workshops about building resilience. She also found a support network.
“Cancer is never going to go away for me. It was something absolutely significant that happened in my life, and I’m better off dealing with it, and recognising that it happened and accepting it. And that’s what I've done, I don’t wake up with fear every day – I listen to my body and seek support when I need it,” she explains.
Kirsten, 56, felt “knocked over with a feather” when her mammogram results revealed that she had cancer last year. “I was the fittest I’ve ever been; the healthiest I’ve ever been. I was in a really good place,” she says. “It sounds so selfish and so shallow, but I thought I’d be the last person to be diagnosed with something like this. I thought I did all the right things. When I went to see the consultant and she told me that my lump was suspicious I was absolutely dumbstruck.”
When it came to telling her husband and grown-up son, she “felt quite sad but equally didn’t want to keep it a secret”. “I felt the best way to go forward was [with] the support of people,” she says. Despite this support, the mother-of-one is struggling to feel like the person she was pre-diagnosis. “My husband has been nothing but loving. He’s taken me to my appointments and sat with me and held my hand. He tells me that he loves me with or without hair; with or without my wonky boob. I, on the other hand, don’t feel able to be intimate.”
commercial editor: lEONIE EASTWOOD ART DIRECTOR: MICHELLE EDWARDS WRITER: kate mccusker PHOTOGRAPHY: KRISTINA Varaksina
Photographers Agent: Peter Bailey Company videographer: lucy galliford production manager & video editor: matt gibbs FASHION Stylist: lauren franks HAIR: ami fujita make-up: laura onea Producer: daniel gould Project manager: eloise tilbury
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hen Iyna underwent treatment for stage-three breast cancer at the age of 30, in 2015, she deleted all of her social media. “I didn’t post any pictures,” she tells Marie Claire UK. “I heard a few people say that it was quite shallow of me to [be self-conscious] and that I should be grateful
that I’m alive and not worry about weight gain or hair. I said, “I get it. I am grateful. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t be annoyed and angry.’”
“Breast cancer takes away everything that society tells us defines us as women – our hair, our eyebrows, lashes, our breasts,” she says. Not that the disease’s impact on her self-esteem began with diagnosis and ended with remission. The emotional heft of undergoing cancer at such a young age – her son was just four at the time of her diagnosis – didn’t fully compute until a few years after treatment.
- NINA
“A lot of people live with stage-four cancer for many years, and you’d never know by looking
at them in the street”
From life-changing diagnoses to finding yourself again, four women get frank about the realities of living with breast cancer
Sense of Self
Iyna
Nina plans on working out after she speaks to Marie Claire UK from the home she shares with her teenage daughter. A former menswear designer with discerning taste, she loves fitness, travel, fashion and beauty. She has more than 30,000 followers on Instagram, where she intersperses snippets of her life with honest beauty reviews. She pairs her posts with long, eloquent captions that would give pause to even the most relentless of scrollers.
But she is not, by any measure, your typical influencer. Nina is living with triple-negative, metastatic cancer, and is as frank about her prognosis with us as she is with her online community. Having been diagnosed early with breast cancer in 2018, just three years later she was confronted with “the biggest fear any patient has”: recurrence.
“I started to really sink into a dark hole,” she says of the period following her secondary diagnosis. Unlike the other women Marie Claire UK spoke to, her cancer is incurable. “When [you are diagnosed with primary breast cancer] You’re told in a way that is like, ‘We can treat this’. But when you are diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, there’s no energy in the way they talk to you – it’s all very sombre and negative. I felt very lost.”
In the last couple of years, Nina – who was initially given just months to live – has taken part in a series of clinical trials. She says her treatment is now a method of “just buying me more time”. Her Instagram account, where she has 30k followers, was set up to “become a positive story for someone else” when she was unable to find any of her own. “It’s important for people to really see what stage-four cancer looks like,” she says. “There are a lot of people living with stage-four cancer for many years, and you would never know by looking at them in the street.”
Like many cancer patients, Nina faces the daily dissonance between life – spending time with her daughter, trying to align a smorgasbord of schedules to finally organise that girls’ trip in the group chat – and the reality of living with secondary cancer. “I am not resigned to the fact that I have a terminal illness,” she says. “I believe in my body. I know what it can do. This body is carrying me through [and] is still somehow fighting this disease and keeping me alive.”
“When you’ve got a cancer diagnosis, it’s not just about having treatment – you’ve still got to get on with life”
As well as the emotional impact of living with the condition, “overwhelming tiredness” has caught her off guard. “Being diagnosed with cancer has exposed me to many feelings that I’ve never been party to before – including feeling very vulnerable and lacking in confidence,” she says. “It’s exposed me to not feeling as confident in many things as I previously was.”
She admits that the phased return to her management job has been difficult, but has provided some form of normality. “When you’ve got a cancer diagnosis, it’s not just about having treatment – you’ve still got to get on with life,” she says. “You’ve still got to put your feet on the floor and walk forward. I think pushing yourself to have a bit of normality is quite important.” Whether it’s a shopping experience at a department store or a trip to the theatre, that bit of normality has come in the form of planning something special with her family in the three-week intervals between chemotherapy. “I am surprised that each day I get up and go forward through another day,” she says. “I’m proud of myself that I’ve managed.”
Of course, no two women’s experience of breast cancer is the same, but Iyna, in particular, felt hers was markedly different to that of many. Raised in a South Asian community, she faced stigma after her diagnosis and speculation about its cause. “When I started to do a lot of talks in South Asian communities [I realised] that we don’t always have to feel like we are deceiving our faith when we go towards science and medicine. They can go hand
in hand.”
Tricia, 52, is on the same page. “[Breast cancer] is still very much a taboo topic in many communities,” she says. “People don’t share [their diagnosis] – even with their own children, their own sisters, their own parents.” The former theatre nurse was diagnosed with stage-one breast cancer in 2019. She felt dismissed by male doctors in the early stages of her treatment and relied on her own medical experience to challenge staff when she didn’t feel listened to
as a patient.
Tricia now campaigns for more research to be published on the disease’s impact on Black women. “We are seeing statistics [that show] that the outcomes for Black women with breast cancer are markedly worse than our white counterparts,” she says. “So if there is demonstrated evidence that screening us at an earlier age increases our chances of [being diagnosed] earlier, thereby getting intervention earlier, why can’t that be embraced?”
In her work within patient organisations, including the World Cancer Research Fund and Black Women Rising, Tricia emphasises the importance of early detection. “I would like to see more serious discussion around changing the age when you are called for a screening,” she says. “We’ve lost so many. I think in honour of all those who have gone before us, we need to just keep going.” Yet these women have already done far more than keep going.
Nina, for example, is training for a week-long “test of endurance” when she takes on a desert trek in Jordan to raise money for Black Women Rising next month. Kirsten is looking ahead to a holiday in the US next May with her husband. Iyna is “looking forward to creating the life” she always wanted. Tricia hopes to continue championing communities that are underrepresented in medical research. “It’s my dream that people walk away from cancer and feel like they’ve gotten something good out of it: that they take something positive out of it rather than it being completely destructive,” says Iyna. “I’m better off recognising that it happened and accepting it so that it can stay a part of my life, but not impact me anymore. And that’s what I’ve started to do.”
If you or your loved one is living with breast cancer, reach out to patient advocacy groups for support. These groups provide useful information for primary and secondary breast-cancer patients in the UK: Breast Cancer Now, Black Women Rising, Maggie’s, Macmillan Cancer Support, METUPUK, Make 2nds Count, Abcdiagnosis.
- KIRSTEN
- TRICIA
“Breast cancer is still very much a taboo topic
in many communities”
Nina
Kirsten
Tricia
This disease awareness material has been funded by Novartis Pharmaceuticals UK Limited (Novartis) and created by Marie Claire UK with direct input from Novartis and participating breast-cancer patients, whose knowledge and insights have informed the content and direction for this advertorial and film. October 2023 / MLR ID: 308439
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