THE words seemed to toll a death sentence – cancer, malignancy, mastectomy – but Mrs Cynthia Fong had no patience for disease or dying.Her thoughts were on life and living. There was, after all, so much to live for.
Her husband’s safety consultancy business, which she helps out in, was doing well. “Our two daughters were in their 20s and starting their careers,” adds Mrs Fong, 55.
“My husband and I were looking forward to spending more time with each other and doing volunteer work.”
The diagnosis, when it came, seemed especially cruel in the light of the more carefree life that was beckoning.
Mrs Fong can pinpoint all too vividly just when the harrowing process began.
Early last year, she and her husband Fong Kim Choy, 58, joined some friends from the Barker Road Methodist Church on a mission trip to Myanmar.
Photos from that trip show her healthy, energetic, smiling. But upon her return, she felt something in her right breast: “I was showering and suddenly I felt this lump I had never felt before.”
Surely it couldn’t be cancer. After all, a mammogram less than two years earlier had delivered a clean bill of health.
But, not wanting to take any chances, she went for another mammogram. The X-ray showed a suspicious 3cm mass in her right breast.
Next came a biopsy. She hoped it would be a false alarm but the results indicated it was all too real – Stage II/III cancer, meaning it had spread to lymph nodes in her armpits.
Worse, the cancer tested positive for a protein called human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2).
Her oncologist, Dr Ang Peng Tiam, the medical director of Parkway Cancer Centre, told her that HER2-positive cancers tend to be more aggressive than other types of breast cancers. They spread faster and tend to recur.
Within the week, she underwent surgery to remove her right breast and some 27 lymph nodes from her right armpit……………..
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