“I’m 68, going on 69. I’ve got three daughters and five grandchildren. My husband and I moved up to Cromwell from Dunedin close to 20 years ago for a lifestyle change. We had lots of plans for retirement, but life got in the way quite severely there for a bit…”
In 2019, Ann was working as an administrator and, as she describes it, “living an ordinary life”. She and her husband have always been heavily involved in the New Zealand Rock ‘n’ Roll dancing scene and both enjoyed getting outdoors. But life changed quickly when Ann began experiencing health problems.
“I had severe stomach pain and vomiting,” she says. “I would be three or four hours over the loo. It started off during the night and then came during the daytime as well. Doctors couldn’t find any rhyme or reason for it. I had none of the standard cancer markers.”
After seeing two separate GPs and a specialist who couldn’t tell her what was going on, Ann was at her wits’ end. “I was getting sicker and sicker, and losing more and more weight. I was absolutely miserable.”
When a new GP started at the practice, Ann went to her and told her something needed to be done. “I was still going to work, and I really don’t know how I did because I was dragging myself around half dead.”
This GP ran a battery of tests and figured out that Ann had coeliac disease. After changing to a strict gluten-free diet, things were better for about six weeks. “Then I woke up one night and I was vomiting and had these dreadful stomach pains again. That was a real low because, by that time, I’d lost about 20 kilos.”
Ann went back to the GP and told her she didn’t feel she could carry on much longer – that every night she was going to bed scared she wouldn’t wake up in the morning. After a scan at the local hospital, Ann was asked to come back that same afternoon.
“The doctor said they found a mass, and it was cancer. And I said, ‘Thank God. What are we gonna do about it?’ I frightened her, actually. She rang me a couple of times in the next couple of days, making sure I was alright, because she said she’d never had anyone take a cancer diagnosis so well.”
“I was so relieved because I knew once they found something, we could work with it.”
Ann and her husband headed down to Dunedin Hospital that evening. She was diagnosed with enteropathy-associated T-cell lymphoma (EATL), a type of lymphoma that occurs in people with coeliac disease. Five days later, she was in surgery to have the mass removed, and two weeks after that was started on R-CHOP chemotherapy.
While in Dunedin Hospital, Ann was visited by LBC Support Services Coordinator Deb. Deb told her about LBC’s support groups, and Ann remembers thinking she didn’t need a support group. “But one of my daughters said to me, ‘I’ll be really cross with you if you don’t go. You just don’t know how helpful they’ll be ‘til you take part.’”
So, she decided to follow her daughter’s advice and give it a go. “I thought, OK, I’ll go along and see what it’s like. And it’s a great group. Really, really good people. We really support each other, and if someone’s having a down time or has any questions, we all tell them about our experiences.”
Ann’s family was another huge source of support. “Throughout the whole thing, my husband has been an absolute rock. He’s been with me the whole time.” Ann was also blown away by how her daughters showed up for her – one paid for somebody to clean her house for a whole year, another kept her freezer filled with nutritious meals, and the third gave her a very special gift before she went up to Christchurch for her stem cell transplant. She gave Ann her laptop and told her there was a PowerPoint presentation saved on it. “She said, ‘You’re allowed to open one page a day.’”
“So, of course, the first day in there, I opened it up. My daughter had contacted people I’d worked with years ago, contacted my friends, the family, the in-laws, and she’d asked them to send me a message, preferably with a picture of something I’d be interested in. And it was lovely. People I hadn’t even thought about in years, she’d found them and asked them to send me a message.”
The knitting patterns, silly jokes and holiday photos were a welcome distraction through the transplant process. “It was really, really, really hard,” Ann says. “But it gave me my life back again. It was a journey and a half, but it was well worth doing.”
When she returned home, she had to build her strength back up from nothing, starting with walks to the letterbox. Once she could walk to the end of the block and back, she started going further afield on her e-bike. “I really credit that for my recovery – from then on, it was all upwards and I just got better.”
It’s now been more than four years since her transplant, and “life’s good,” Ann says. “I was discharged back in May. I’m fully cured, which is amazing, because we didn’t expect that. They told me that would probably never come, because with a blood cancer they can’t be entirely sure. But she said no, I’ve been absolutely fine for four and a half years.”
Going through lymphoma has completely changed Ann’s outlook on life. “Life is to be enjoyed. I make a real point of enjoying everything. It’s given me such a positive perspective. There are so many really good things to do and enjoy – that’s why I’ve taken up golf, because I always said I’d do it one day. But you don’t know if one day’s actually gonna happen – so get out there and do it!”