Weeks after winning a silver medal in double-mini trampoline at the 2017 World Games, Tamara O’Brien felt a strange lump under her chin while watching TV in her mother’s Coquitlam duplex.
O’Brien, who spent her childhood on her sport’s world stage, is now opening up about her difficult health journey. She hopes she can help other youth battling cancer who are struggling, as she initially did, to connect with people their own age. The pride in her voice dissolves into sorrow, though, when she talks about the injustice of this illness. “To watch this happen and not be able to have any control over the outcome and what is happening, is the hardest thing in the world.”
By her own account, O’Brien has good days and bad days, days of determination and days of dark depression. “I realize how powerful my story is to people. I think that is a huge purpose in my life, just being able to share and help, in whatever people decide to take out of my story.”O’Brien had “an abundance of energy” when she was a toddler. “I used to stack stuff together when I was young and stand on it. My mother put me into gymnastics when I was two.”
After she returned home, she found the lump under her chin. It was near a spot where, the previous year, she’d had a mole removed that would test positive for melanoma. O’Brien knew her battle with cancer would force her to quit the national trampoline team and focus her energy entirely on her health.
She would have four more surgeries, between January and March 2018, but doctors couldn’t remove all the stubborn cancer spreading microscopically through her neck. After a scan in April 2018, her oncologist delivered the worst news yet. “I was like, ‘No, it’s actually me,’” she recalled. “The young adults are forgotten. There are supports out there, but I really had to look for it. Which is sad.”
Participants can discuss issues that are relevant to their lives, said Hankinson, such as body image or fear of losing their fertility after cancer treatments. “Some of the reasons are that AYA, in clinical trials and research, they are very under-represented,” Goddard said. In the fall, O’Brien’s doctors put her on new pills that try to slow down the cancer, and they appeared to be working — although the nasty side effects include hair loss.
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