'This can't be normal': Young woman's harrowing battle with cancer
Four years ago, at just 22, Lisa Griffiths got news you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.
Living in Brisbane at the time, she would suffer from intense migraines and sometimes spend days vomiting. While doctors were at a loss to explain her condition, it was around this time she turned to her then partner and unwittingly made a heartbreakingly prescient prediction.
“I reckon I’ve got a brain tumour. This can’t be normal,” she said to him.
She had just visited a new doctor who encouraged her to come in for extensive blood tests and a CT scan.
“I had a feeling weeks before that,” she told Yahoo News Australia.
When doctors saw the scan of her brain she was quickly told that someone would need to come pick her up, as she shouldn’t be driving. That’s when she knew it was bad.
It was July 2015 and Ms Griffiths was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive brain cancer. She underwent brain surgery that month and then started chemotherapy.
Doctors didn’t expect her to live much longer than a year at that point, but maybe they underestimated the fighting spirit of the Cairns real estate agent. It’s a quality she’ll need more than ever after learning on Monday that cancerous tumours found in her lungs in July this year had spread to her skull, and continue to grow in her lungs despite treatment. Her condition is now considered terminal.
“Without treatment they’ve given me a few months to live and with treatment maybe a year,” she said.
After learning that cancer had spread to her lungs in July, she seemed to take it in her stride.
“I’ve beaten brain cancer three times so here’s to adding a lung chapter to my resume,” she wrote on Facebook at the time.
Speaking to Yahoo News Australia while on the way to update her will and estate, her grounded and optimistic nature seemed unshakable.
“They gave me about a year and I’ve since done four years so I’m not giving up now,” she said.
Despite being only 26, she is a veteran of this fight game. After her first brain surgery, she had to learn how to walk again. And then after her latest and third brain surgery, Ms Griffiths lost her peripheral vision.
“That has been a huge adjustment for me obviously … I can’t see someone standing next to me,” she said.
After her sight was affected, she couldn’t drive for six months but worst of all, she said, people would sometimes accuse her of ignoring them, not realising she just couldn’t see them.
“No one expected my cancer to do what it’s doing, not even my specialist,” Ms Griffiths said.
But despite the steady stream of bad news, she has continued to live a relatively normal life and kept an upbeat attitude throughout her ordeal.
“I think the people that I work with they help a lot. The girls at work have been incredible to say the least ... I work with my best friends and not many people can say that.”
She also credits the Cairns community and her new partner of five months with helping her stay positive.
“Through every grim diagnosis and only weeks after each surgery she turned up to work every day personality with a positive attitude, always looking to make others smile,” her friend Megs Whiteside said in a GoFundMe page set up to fund some desperate last minute medical treatments.
They involve travelling to the US and then Mexico for some “holistic treatment” before returning home to Australia to continue traditional medical interventions, Ms Griffiths said.
“The only way to access the treatment needed is to pay for it. There is no government assistance or anyway of subsidising this cost,” the GoFundMe page reads.
“This is why we are asking people to help in the form of donating funds. This is not a cheap option, but our only one.”
With the goal of $150,000, the campaign has raised nearly $90,000 at the time of writing.
It will be a miracle if she’s able to defy the doctors’ grim prognosis again – but she’s certainly not lacking in confidence.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
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