Horrific accident, divorce, overseas move, change jobs, renovate a house. What could possibly be more fun? Breast cancer, of course! Here’s how the artist survived.

From the Artist:

"In late 2018 I was living in Darwin. I had recently changed jobs and moved myself and two cats back to Australia from Hong Kong, where I’d managed to (just) survive working for a psychopath. I was in the process of renovating my dump of a house, and trying to divorce someone whom I couldn’t contact, but whose life I had saved after a horrific accident, only to find I’d been deeply betrayed by him.
I ticked so many boxes for” having a shit time”. So, I should have known, the morning I woke up and felt like living again, that the best was yet to come. From the moment I found a lump in my breast I knew it was bad.
I slowly tried to navigate the mysterious whims of the health care system. It seems diagnosis and treatment is highly dependent on your postcode. Had I been in Melbourne I could have had the whole thing done within a day. As it was, in Darwin, it took two months! Had I been indigenous and/or from a remote community, I think I’d be dead now.
I discovered that if you are symptom-free you can have a mammogram within a couple of days, but if you have symptoms you need to go to a GP to get a referral for a mammogram which can’t be done for two weeks. And if the mammogram looks scary, then it’s two weeks wait to get an ultrasound. And if that looks bad, and the radiologist says you should have a biopsy the same day (yep, that bad!) it’s two weeks wait to do this, despite his efforts on my behalf. One receptionist actually said to me, knowing I was facing a potential cancer diagnosis and after me begging for an earlier appointment, “Well, you’ll just have to put it out of your mind”! Finally, to get the results, you have (you guessed it) a two-week wait to see the surgeons. Then you discover that they forgot to do one of the major tests, and don’t have any biopsy tissue left…
And yet I found myself indignant, when I was finally diagnosed. I really, actually thought “But I ate kale last week”, as if somehow that would change things! I realized then that the only way to get through this was to look for the funny side.
Yet here I am, seven years later, still alive!
My cartoons allowed me to feel what I was feeling and then let it go. Once it was down on paper. I no longer had to hold it in my brain, which really lightened the load. Of course, there were so many other things that helped: a delightful oncologist, a superb and highly skilled psychologist, the amazing, kind, funny, sensitive nurses, and of course fabulous friends and family and my two cats, who sat through all of it with me without judgement.
I hope you appreciate the exhibition, even if you can’t enjoy it."

*** Content warning :
Content in this exhibition can be confronting, and it is not recommended for anyone newly diagnosed with cancer. However, carers, friends and family, employers and anyone half-way or more through cancer treatment are encouraged to attend.