It’s not the body I had, but it’s alive and that’s good
Each year in Ireland, 2,500 women are diagnosed with the disease. Lawlor was diagnosed this time last year. “I’d noticed a few niggly things that summer, but what confused me was there was no discernible lump. Anytime I felt nervous, I’d look for a lump and I didn’t find one. There was a bit of skin puckering, but you’re getting a bit older and droopier.”
Breast cancer killed her mother at 47, so Lawlor was alert. Feeling “a bit silly”, she went to her GP, who referred her to the breast clinic in St Vincent’s Hospital. “My appointment was two and a half weeks later, so it’s not like I was rushed in,” she says.
In quick succession, she had a mammogram, ultrasound and biopsy. “By the time the radiographer did the punch biopsy, I knew they’d found a lump they didn’t like the look of. I asked questions. People weren’t giving me answers, but I picked up answers between the lines.”
The diagnosis came a week later. Doctors mapped out what would happen — chemotherapy before surgery, followed by radiotherapy. “It was in the lymph, so it was stage two, not stage one. There’s a part of you that instantly doesn’t process it. Your mouth is opening and talking, but another part of you is like your skin has got flayed off and you just can’t believe it.”
The diagnosis period is busy. “A lot of scans to find out the extent of the cancer, lots of people to be told, work to be told. It makes the next couple of weeks incredibly busy. There’s a part of you that’s not in the world. You’ve been given this news that’s going to change your life — and maybe end it,” Lawlor says.
She told her older children — David, 23, and twins Megan and Jack, 18 — before she had the biopsy result but didn’t tell their sister, 11-year-old Ella, until after her birthday party in mid-October. “I wanted her to have her birthday party in peace. It wasn’t the easiest thing. I’m still very emotional about it.”
Lawlor’s mum was diagnosed before Christmas but didn’t tell her children until after. Lawlor recalls being “a bitch to my mother that Christmas. That’s why I wanted my older children to know what was coming down the tracks. They were shocked. They were very sweet, very kind. When I fell apart on the little one’s birthday, they put me to bed and made me cups of tea and finished getting the party ready.
“It’s not just being told the news — it’s dealing with it all winter. One’s in college, two were doing their Leaving Cert and one was in primary school, so they had their own stuff going on. Friends and family were fantastic in the care they took of us and the children, but I’m not saying it was easy for any of them,” she says. Husband Ian Wilson, a 2fm radio producer, “was great, amazing … it’s such a sad time for your partner. It’s a very personal thing between a couple. He was fantastic. I’m not going to say anymore.”
Of the gruelling treatment that got her an all-clear in the spring, she says the chemo was the worst. “As it progressed, I began to feel a lump in the breast. It began to dawn on me that it had been, basically, my whole breast [that was affected] — that was kind of a shock.
“The days when I was strong, I’d researched a lot. It’s scary the more you find out, but reassuring in other ways. You have weeks when the tumour’s responding well, days when your prognosis isn’t so good, days when you vary in terms of what you’re able to take in. I did a TV interview in my wig and false eye-lashes, with Dr Dennis Slamon, the guy who discovered Herceptin, the day before the mastectomy, just to get me through that day. On days when I was weakest, I watched Judge Judy and re-runs of Dallas.”
Lawlor didn’t look beyond the Irish healthcare system for treatment. “If you go to a centre of excellence here, the outcomes are very good. The drugs I was on would be the same in any other country and I was on a trial drug [Lapatinib] that I wouldn’t have been able to get in many other places.”
She had a full mastectomy and all the lymph glands removed. “That’s had the biggest impact. A lot of people get a really bad time with lymphoedema. I didn’t get it, but I have a lot of pain. They’ve taken all the nerves and drainage system from my left arm, so the arm and shoulder are weakened and damaged.” Her body, she says, “is not the body I had, but it’s alive and that’s a good thing … You have to wait a while before reconstruction but I’ve dyed my hair.”
It was a joy to return to the airwaves on Jul 6. “We didn’t tell Cathal [Mac Coille]. He saw my name on the running order and said ‘this is a mistake — they put Áine’s name on the list’. And then I walked in,” she says. Things will never be the same. “There’s a new normal. I’m so happy to be able to work, to be involved in running my family again. I did my first yoga class recently. I’m back at pilates. To be able to do these, when there were days I was barely able to make it downstairs, is just fantastic.”
Does she see herself as a poster woman for breast cancer? “No, I don’t. I was overwhelmed by the public’s response, which went on right through my illness up to my return to work. That so many people reached out was a real strength at very difficult times. I was surprised at how many people in politics got in touch — there’s a lot of humanity, a lot of kindness.
“In doing an interview like this, I’m hoping to reach out to other people for whom it’s relevant,” she says.
And does she ask ‘why me?’ “Why not me? Why a young girl who’s still in college, why a woman who’s just got engaged, why people who have twins, like me, but theirs are babies?”
Her breast cancer was genetic, she says, though she only “gave up the fags” after diagnosis. Lawlor has just finished Herceptin and will be on hormone therapy for five years. And, yes, she worried about dying. “It’s cancer. It can kill you. You don’t know until the end of treatment whether it’s all gone.
“You don’t know whether it will come back. You meet lots of people while you’re in there who are in there because it did come back. It’s an issue you have to deal with. But I’m here now and that’s all any of us know.”
