Diagnosed with breast cancer a day before giving birth, TV reporter Sally Obermeder is now in the fight for her life.
Any mother knows the rush of bringing another life into the world. No matter the circumstances leading up to it, or the things that transpire after it, nothing can alter the purity of that moment when a child is born.
So it was for Sally Obermeder — albeit a too brief moment of happiness in the midst of a living nightmare.
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Only 24 hours before giving birth, the bubbly Today Tonight entertainment reporter was diagnosed with aggressive Stage 3 breast cancer.
She was 41 weeks pregnant and about to bring into the world her longed-for first child (the result of seven years of trying and a round of IVF) when a routine visit to her obstetrician had revealed a lump which had led to a scan which quickly became the biopsy that brought Sally’s world crashing down around her.
While baby Annabelle was gestating in Sally’s womb, a 6cm tumour had been growing in her breast. So keen were the doctors to start chemotherapy, they induced labour.
And so, what was supposed to be one of the most joyous days of Sally’s life had cruelly, unexpectedly, become one of the most terrifying.
She was meant to feel nervousness, excitement and elation yet all she could feel was devastation.
“I turned up at the hospital sobbing uncontrollably,” Sally recalls. “Which is not how you want to bring a child into the world. And yet I was just so scared about all the unknowns.”
During labour, oncologists continued to take biopsies, prepping Sally for a series of tests to determine the best course of chemotherapy.
And so, as she cradled her newborn daughter in her arms and tried to soak up the magic of the moment, all she could think of was the dark, uncertain road that lay ahead of her.
“I had a whole day with Annabelle during which it was just about her and me,” remembers Sally. “I felt like every other mum, which was beautiful. But the next day, it was back to the bone scans, cat scans and blood tests. Everyone else on the maternity ward was so happy and all I could think was: ‘Why me?'”
When we meet, it’s been six weeks since the birth of Annabelle, and six weeks and a day since Sally, 38 was diagnosed with cancer.
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In that time she’s undergone two cycles of chemotherapy, a debilitating experience she describes as “like being beaten all over with a baseball bat.”
“Just over a month ago, my biggest preoccupation was working out which Mummy and Me yoga class I would go to,” Sally tells The Weekly from the light-filled Sydney apartment she shares with her husband, Marcus. “Now I’m in a fight for my life.”
So crippling is the chemotherapy, Sally often can’t perform even the most basic of maternal duties. She knows it’s irrational, but with each cry she is unable to tend to she can’t help but feel she is letting her baby down.
“The chemo is so brutal I am out of action for at least four of five days,” she says. “I can’t get up in the night to feed Annabelle or change her. I’m not her full-time carer and it distresses me.
“This is not how it’s supposed to be. She is supposed to know that I am there for her no matter what, not just when the cancer allows. And I hate the cancer for that. Because I feel like it has taken something precious from me and from my baby girl.
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“This is something I have wanted my whole life, and now that I have it, I feel like it’s completely compromised. I thought I would be in this baby-and-me bubble. It would just be us, and it would be so beautiful. But instead there’s me and the cancer in one bubble and me and Annabelle in the other bubble, and I just keep shuffling between the two.”
The chemotherapy is expected to continue until February, at which point doctors will decide the next course of action, which could be anything from the simple removal of the tumour to the removal of the entire breast.
“It’s a long road,” says Sally. “I can’t think beyond the next cycle of chemo. It’s all happened so fast, I can only really takes things one day at a time.”
Whatever happens, there’s a chance she will go into early menopause. It’s a prospect mitigated somewhat by the fact that, thanks to IVF, four embryos belonging to Sally and Marcus are “on ice”.
“That’s my great hope,” says Sally. “That one of those embryos might one day become a sibling for Annabelle.”
And for herself? Does the spectre of mortality haunt her every waking moment?
“It did in the beginning,” she says. “But now I have faith in the medicine and I feel like I will be okay eventually. What I am grieving is the loss of my life in the meantime. The loss of this special time with my baby.
“It’s gotten to the point now where I look forward to the middle of the night feeds. When I hear Annabelle cry, my heart skips with joy because it means she is awake and we can spend time together.”
And so they sit together in the silence of the night, and Sally feeds Annabelle and loses herself staring into her daughter’s eyes.
If there is a silver lining to the cloud that hangs over her, it’s that the cancer has made Sally appreciate every second she spends with her little girl.
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“Suddenly, life has become very simple,” she says. “All the running around and getting ahead and accumulating things — it all counts for nothing. At the end of the day it’s the simple things that are important. It’s me and Annabelle and Marcus. It’s basically about love. It’s all about loving others and being loved.
“I look at Annabelle and I think my only option is to fight this. I absolutely refuse to finally have a child and then die. No way. I have so much I want to see my little girl do — see her first steps, see her go to school. She’s why I fight. She’s why I fight.”
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