Sydney resident Rachael Murphy is grateful for the small things.
Simply being able to get off the couch is something she doesn’t take for granted.
It’s an outlook shaped by an “intense” health battle that reinforced her sense she was “lucky to be alive”.
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The 31-year-old was applying for permanent residency with her partner Mick in 2022 when a mandatory health assessment noticed something was wrong.
Further testing revealed masses in her neck and chest, which were later diagnosed as Stage 2A Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
“It was a pretty big shock,” she told 7NEWS.com.au.
Looking back, Murphy said there were signs but nothing obvious enough to set off alarm bells.
“I was pretty tired but I would put it down to a long day,” she said.
Any chest issues were also just chalked up to her asthma being troublesome.
“It was only when I looked Hodgkin’s lymphoma up online that I kind of married them up,” she said.
“It was pretty scary.”
A trip home to the UK was on the cards before Murphy’s doctor stressed the importance of starting treatment immediately, describing the tumours as “sinister”.
“After that, it all started to snowball very quickly,” Murphy said.
Determined not to have her life completely derailed, Murphy underwent a round of IVF before starting 15 weeks of gruelling chemotherapy and radiation, even as treatment threatened her dream of having children.
The first round of chemo “hit me like a tonne of bricks”, she said.
Murphy suffered debilitating side effects, including severe jaw pain and a burning sensation that made her saliva taste acidic.
“I’m not a wuss. I don’t go to the doctor for just anything, so I tried to manage it myself,” she said.
But the side effects were so severe she ended up in the emergency department twice, spiking her anxiety about future rounds of treatment.
“‘I thought, ‘I can’t do this’,” she said.
Her haematologist prescribed her with a white blood cell injection to help ease the side effects — and it was a “game changer”.
“It just became manageable,” Murphy said.
“I could get up off the couch.”
Murphy’s message
January marked one year in remission for Murphy, who has since become a permanent resident, and a recent trip to the radiologist calmed any ongoing anxieties about her cancer returning.
“He said at this stage it’s 90 per cent likely the cancer won’t come back, which was so great to hear,” she said.
But Murphy knows not everyone is so lucky.
“If I had a different cancer, the outlook would have been much different,” she said.
“There needs to be more research and funding into other cancers.”
Her experience with the deadly disease was “short but intense” — and she thanks her lucky stars each day.
“For anyone else going through it, I used to just focus on the small wins,” she said.
“Even if I just went out of the house without my wig on.
“Cancer is such a big thing to digest, this helped me get through.”
Murphy is sharing her story as the face of the 2KM a Day in May challenge, raising money for cancer research.
“For me, it’s so important to raise awareness and money for cancer research,” she said.
“I believe that’s the thing that saved my life.
“If there wasn’t as much research into my cancer, the outlook would have been different.”
Murphy wants young people to take her story as a reminder to listen to their bodies and get regular health checks.
“Don’t put it off because you’re working hard or something,” she said.
“I don’t have cancer in the family, I didn’t think it was going to happen to me.
“I was only 30 at the time, I thought I was fine.”
