A new generation of hope

For two decades, the McGrath Foundation has revolutionised care for Australian women with breast cancer. Now it's ready to take on an even bigger challenge. Entering a milestone year, the organisation's founders, nurses and patients share their incredible stories of triumph and tragedy with The Weekly.

- GENEVIEVE GANNON

It was January 2, 2022, when Emma Tink first noticed the lump. She was in the shower on the property near Dubbo, where she lives with her husband, Brad, and their three children, when she felt an irregularity in her armpit.

It might be nothing, she thought, but it could be a very serious something. Emma didn't panic. She hadn't noticed anything in either of her breasts, and she's an “eternal optimist”. She would get it checked, she thought, but there was a complication.

“The second of January wasn't a great time to find a lump,” she explains. “Being regionally based, access to services, particularly through holiday times, was a bit limited.”

Emma's GP was on holiday, so she saw a locum who sent her for an ultrasound, but she couldn't get in for a scan for a couple of weeks. When the results came back, the doctor suggested the swollen lymph node could have been caused by her recent COVID vaccine. Emma was sure it wasn't. She booked herself into BreastScreen, then went on a family holiday. By late February, she could see changes in her breast.

“If I lifted my arm up, I could see a definite line across my left breast that didn't exist in my right,” she says. “I was freaking out by that point.”

Her BreastScreen booking had to be pushed back again when family members contracted COVID. When she finally had her appointment, she was told she'd need a biopsy.

Brad was waiting for her, and when she got in the car, she burst into tears. It would still be a few days before she was officially diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. She had an 8cm-by-8cm series of tumours in her breast.

Her doctor was direct. “He said, ‘It's not great’. He went through all the different factors. He said, ‘Well, this is on your side.’ Except most of the things weren't on my side. I'm actually on the crappy side of the statistics.”