"I was lucky,” says Teresa Mannion. It is a word that the RTÉ news journalist uses often when she’s talking about her life before and after being diagnosed with breast cancer in February 2013.
Lucky, because she was diligent about regularly checking her body; lucky because she was diagnosed early; lucky because she lived next door to University Hospital Galway; lucky because she acted (eventually) when she received the letter from BreastCheck. If there was one unlucky part in all of this, it was that Mannion’s cancer was an especially aggressive one. But sometimes you bring your own luck (or outlook) and that can make all the difference.
Today, Mannion is reticent about making too big a deal of her illness (“I just had a little lumpectomy”) but her journey, which involved chemo, radiotherapy and counselling, took a toll. “There were times that I would burst into tears, feeling so low and overwhelmed by it all, and other times I’d wake up with night terrors,” she says when I ask her about the specifics.
“I had this recurring nightmare that I hadn’t taken my drugs and that I would die.” Now she tells her story, in the hope that it might help someone else.
“If it even gets one person to pick up the phone and make an appointment for a mammogram, then it will be good,” she says.
You may know Teresa Mannion as RTÉ’s Western Correspondent. You may also know her as ‘Your wan that went bananas during that storm in Salthill’. Her dramatic news report (“DON’T make unnecessary journeys!” “DON’T take risks on treacherous roads! “DON’T swim in the sea!”) of December 5 last spawned a string of parodies and put Mannion on the world-wide map.
Afterwards, she fielded questions from national and international media, popped up on The Late Late Show and almost a year on, she’s still being asked for selfies. But amid all the fun and factoids (did you know Mannion was born when Hurricane Debbie hit these shores in 1961?), there was no talk of the darkness at the edge of life.
It was a letter from BreastCheck, the government-funded programme that provides free mammograms to women over 50, that opens that part of Mannion’s story. She admits that the missive lay on the kitchen counter for months amid the other domestic flotsam and jetsam. “I just ignored it until someone said to me that they were getting a mammogram and I was overwhelmed with guilt,” she says.
From her house she could see the oncology unit at University Hospital Galway: a short walk for what she imagined would be a routine checkup.
After all, she felt in good health, there were no tell-tale symptoms (unusual lumps, puckering of skin) and no family history of breast cancer. So one day in February 2013, she made the short walk that would turn her life upside-down. A few days after the mammogram, Mannion received a call-back letter. “The radiologist had spotted something,” she says. Even then, she was not overly alarmed.
“The morning I got that letter I was on my way to London with my family so it didn’t really impact. I thought ‘I’m not going to get myself into a tizzy about this’. I’m just going to go to London and enjoy myself with my family.” So she did and on her return made an appointment and very quickly she underwent a battery of tests, including an ultrasound scan, a number of biopsies and an MRI. “Eventually, they detected a tiny tumour, what I call a dot of cancer,” she says.
The tumour was tiny but the breast cancer was the most aggressive type: triple-negative (TNBC). “There was no medication I could take,” says Mannion. “I didn’t even know there were different kinds of breast cancer and now I was diagnosed with the worst kind.”
On the day she got the diagnosis, Mannion was alone. “I will never forget the words of the breast surgeon, Professor Michael Kerin, who broke the news to me,” she says. “He said to me ‘You have a guardian angel’ and those words stayed with me through all the subsequent months.‘We have caught this early so you will be fine.’”
That evening she broke the news to her husband, Dave, and their two teenage boys Cian (now 18) and Tom (17). “We were all a bit shell-shocked but I told them the prognosis was good,” she says. “An earlier biopsy confirmed that the cancer had not spread to my lymph nodes and now I was going to have surgery very soon. I also mentioned the guardian angel and all of that.”
The surgery was almost immediate but because of the aggressive nature of the cancer, she underwent four cycles of chemotherapy which resulted in the loss of her hair. For Mannion, that was the toughest thing of all.
“I had heard all the horror stories about chemotherapy, but all I could think of was hair loss,” she says. “I know it sounds weird, but losing my hair was the worst thing because you really identify with your hair. My hair had started to fall out in clumps so that you feel like this shaggy dog with hair everywhere, on the sofa, on the bathroom floor and so on. I went to a specialist salon in Galway with my colleague and good friend, Bethan Kilfoil, who helped me make the decision to shave my hair."
It was so nice to have another woman there, a friend to help me through it.” She wore wigs, even sported a hippy-like headband. “I loved my wig,” she says. “It rocked. People would stop me on the street to say how much they liked my hair. But chemo is no picnic. You feel like you’re being bombed and in a way you are.” During her chemotherapy, the emotional impact took a toll. “I went for counselling to Cancer Care West,” she says. “Initially, I found it really hard to go through those doors as I didn’t want to be in that Cancer Club. But I found that it was great to just let it all out. You’re in a safe place where you don’t have to put on a brave face. In some way, I was ‘owning’ my cancer, if that makes sense.”
Teresa Mannion is now cancer free, as far as medical science can measure: her last mammogram in February was clear. “Sure I dodged a bullet. I’m three and a half years on now and while there is a before cancer and an after cancer, it really doesn’t define me,” she says. “It gives you a new perspective for sure, that thing where if you have your health, it’s all that matters. Just rejoice that you can get up in the morning and don’t sweat the small stuff.
"Although my husband Dave will laugh reading that, because while I can get bogged down in the detail, when big things come along I deal with them.”
For more information on Breastcheck, go to breastcheck.ie
