Teesside woman with stage four breast cancer urging people to get checked
It's Breast Cancer Awareness Month
A Teesside woman with stage four breast cancer is re-iterating calls for funding and research to find a cure or a way of controlling secondary breast cancer so people can live longer.
44 year-old Alison Newlove from Norton was diagnosed in July 2022 after finding a lump but doctors told her it had already spread to her bones and it's incurable.
She's sharing her story in the hopes women and men check themselves and to see their GP if they're worried.
Alison said: "You go from one minute living your normal life to the next minute writing letters to your children and arranging your funeral. For about six months, I was in a really bad place. I just kept thinking I was going to die every day.
"I didn't really know how to feel, because initially I thought, 'right, it's primary, we can deal with this, let's get rid of it.' You hear so many success stories these days, especially with primary breast cancer, but the minute they said, 'we found something on your spine, it was just... my world just completely ended.
"I lost my identity completely. Obviously, I had made the decision to retire to spend more time with my kids, because when you're sat in that room and they say to you, 'you'd be lucky to see three to five years" it's devastating. It's a bit surreal, in a way, that I had to deal with that at age 40.
"What actually helped me was getting in touch with people who ran cancer groups and realising there are people out there who live with this, and they can outlive the prognosis as well, so that gave me a lot of hope.
"Some people do die within the prognosis they've been given, but there are people who are outliving it. Secondary Matters, over at the Maggie's Centre in James Cook, has been a really big help, because there are ladies there who have outlived their prognosis and they're still here today to tell their story, so I just keep hoping that happens to me.
"A lump is the obvious one, but you can get a lot of breast cancers that are just a little bit of a change in the breast. It can be a red mark, a little bit of dimpling, a bit of pain maybe. Also check around the collarbone; you can get lumps around there. This also applies to men as well. People are quite surprised there are a lot of men who get diagnosed with breast cancer.
"One of the big signs for me was that I used to fall asleep at my desk on an afternoon at work and I could not keep my eyes open. I kept going back to the doctor saying, 'there's something not right' and that, to me, should have been a red flag.
"Primary breast cancer, a lot of them can be cured these days, but secondary breast cancer, once it has spread beyond the breast, is just incurable. And I just think we need more funding and more research to find a cure ultimately, but if not a cure, then to control the disease so that we can live a long time with it."
Alison attends sessions at Hope Cancer Support Group in Billingham for all cancers and Secondary Matters which is based at Maggie's at James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough.