FEATURES: When she makes her way through the gate at the LYIT campus for next weekend’s Relay for Life, Letterkenny woman, Tina Moore, can sum up the experience in one line: “It’s as if someone has wrapped me in a warm, comfy blanket.”
It’s ten years on since she embarked on a journey that nobody wants to
take but so many are forced to – once they hear the words: ‘You’ve got cancer.”
She describes hearing her particular diagnosis as an “awful shock” and wanting time to go back to those moments before being told by her doctor.
Before the emergence of the sinister tumour that prompted her to seek medical advice.
“I just thought, you’re making a terrible mistake, you’re talking about somebody else.
“This happens on a T.V. programme or on the radio or you read about it somewhere but it can’t be happening to me.
“There is that denial time until you can finally get your head around
it,” Lurgybrack resident, Tina, maintains.
In December 2006 denial was no longer an option when she underwent a
mastectomy. “I was seen fairly quickly and had the mammogram, the ultrasound and a biopsy.
“I was due to have it [the mastectomy] a week after the diagnosis and I was all ready for theatre but I had laryngitis and they cancelled the operation for a week.
“They decided it could be a problem to bring me around and said I could have ended up in intensive care.”
Tina was also ordered not to talk for the duration of the week to help ease her laryngitis.
“But I was so glad to get the operation over especially as it was such a large tumour.”
A month later, as the New Year got up and running, Tina was facing into a period of chemotherapy.
“Every fourteen days for sixteen weeks,” she details the time frame.
There followed a period of sickness and ailing energy levels until her body acclimatized to the treatment and the medication kicked in.
“I completed the course of chemo in May 2007 and the following July started into five weeks of radiotherapy treatment at St Luke’s Hospital.”
She travelled to Dublin on a Monday in the Friends of Letterkenny General Hospital bus driven by Manus Kelly.
“I would go up on the Monday and back on the Friday every week during the treatment.
It started in July 2007 and finished in the first week in August.”
On one occasion, along with family members, including her sister, Ann Maybury who resides in Blanchardstown, Tina undertook a night-time tour of the city and was stepping off the bus on O’Connell Street when a tall American girl in her early twenties approached her.
“She asked me to tell her my name and when I did she thanked me because, she said, ‘I want to pray for you.’ And then she ran off.
“I have no idea who she was but she picked me out of hundreds of people on O’Connell Street that night. And I often think about it. I was actually going to ring in to the Gerry Ryan show on the radio about it but I never did.”
During the Relay for Life of 2013, Tina decided to have her head shaved as part of the Church of Ireland Diocesan Relay team led by Canon Stewart Wright and his wife, Eva.
As a result she raised a remarkable 4,082 euro and ten Sterling. “During the shave, members of ‘Team Spirit’ went round with buckets collecting and gathered 700 euro alone.”
Tina had lost her hair during her cancer treatment but this time, as she says, she was in the driving seat.
There was to be a surprise for the affable Kilross native after the completion of the shave. “I was just turning to go and get off the stage when who came out from behind it but Majella O’Donnell. I couldn’t believe it.
“Apparently she had read beforehand about the shave and asked the Relay organisers could she come along. And she positioned herself out of the limelight until I was finished.
“I had watched her on the ‘Late Late Show’ talking about her own experience and had shed a few tears I remember.
But for her to want to come along and be there for the head shave was something special for me,” Tina, one of the most bubbly personalities you could meet,
proclaims.
Not the only monies raised by a family member for cancer services, it
should be noted. Tina’s husband, Alan, and their good friend, Hugh
Gibbons, undertook the Historic Section of the Donegal Car Rally in
2007 and helped generate 18,200 euro for the Day Services Oncology
unit at Letterkenny Hospital.
Her cancer journey has, in its own way, been inspiring. “I have met so
many amazing people along the way. And to this day I can only thank
all the medical staff at St. Luke’s Hospital and those at Letterkenny
General Hospital, in the ancology day services and breast care
departments.
“I’m so grateful too, to Linda Orr from the Academy Hair and Beauty
salon in Letterkenny who carried out the shave for me. I can’t believe
it’s three years since I did it.”
And ten years since she was told she had breast cancer and underwent
the mastectomy and the subsequent treatment that followed.
And some time later got involved in Relay for Life and the Survivors
choir – that blanket of warmth and comfort that has embraced so many
in the event’s five year existence in Donegal.
