Dear family and friends,

Please help raise funds to give me the gift of my lifetime - a beautiful glass photographic portrait of myself by world-renowned portrait and fashion photographer Robbie Merritt - and support the work of an incredible local charity - Cancer Support WA.

Please show your support by sponsoring my portrait.

Thank you

Karen Finnegan

My daughter Erin's story

Erin was always a lively happy child growing up, she had such a wonderful character. She loved her siblings, her older sister Bonnie, and her two younger brothers Luke and Sam. She and her brothers became great friends as adults.

She was also very popular as a teenager at school and maintained her school friendships right up to the end of her life.

She was 6’ 3’ (190.5cm) and very fit, loved riding her pushbike, laughing, our Fridays together and her social life.

I am an addiction counsellor in a residential rehab working with many traumatised individuals. One resident touched my heart as she fought her alcohol addiction in rehab while her 25 year old daughter was in the final stages of cervical cancer. I sat on the bench with her one day as she wept. What do you say to a mother whose child is dying of cancer? I said the only thing I could think of…” I cannot imagine what it would be like to be in your situation, nor would I want to. Only you know this pain and all I can do is offer my presence” it felt like a poor offering but she slipped her hand into mine and we sat in silence, staring into the bush. This was the beginning of May 2009.

Sometime back in March 2009, Erin had told me that she was experiencing increasing pain in her back, was becoming more and more breathless, she had noticed that her heartbeat was irregular and her feinting spells were increasing. Erin was no stranger to feinting spells; she has never been able to stand still for any length of time without passing out. This started when she was 12 after a rapid growth spurt. But these spells were coming out of the blue and she had even fallen into the easels at work one time. With my encouragement we started on the treadmill of doctors and tests. The diagnosis was she had pneumonia and was prescribed antibiotics; she was prescribed painkillers for her back pain and sent to a chiropractor. The antibiotics did not clear her pneumonia and the painkillers were not working either. By April I was getting phone calls in the night asking me to take her to the hospital because she could not stand the pain in her back. She wasn’t as worried about the pneumonia as she was about this back pain. This happened another 4 times during April, every time she was told she had pneumonia prescribed yet more antibiotics, painkillers for her back and told to see a physio or chiropractor. She was also sent back to see her GP who was getting quite perplexed at the persistence of her pneumonia and it’s resistance to treatment. Mother’s day came and I had my family meal as usual surrounded by my adult children, one of my favourite things. Erin had done a painting for me and bought me a salt lamp. She even joked about being tempted to keep it for herself because she liked it so much, “It glows a subtle pink and is very calming” she had said. I could see she was in a lot of pain all afternoon, I had offered for her to lie on my bed but she didn’t want to miss out on us all being together.

I took her home about 6:30 and she said she was going to go to bed. 2am my husband Jim nudged me and said your phone just went off, knowing how Erin had been I got up straight away and rung her back. She was beside herself with the pain and apologising for it at the same time. I went straight over and took up to the hospital for the 5^th time in as many weeks, beginning to feel very concerned. She had so many tests it wasn’t funny so we knew it wasn’t cancer but it was not going away. This time we saw the same doctor we had seen the last time and he was concerned that whatever was going on with her was not clearing up. The pneumonia had got worse not better and she was writhing in agony with her back. He told me that they were going to stabilise her pain and give her a full body scan to see what was happening with her. By this time Bonnie and Luke were at the hospital with me and so we waited stroking her hair, mopping her brow, then the morphine kicked in and we were holding her hair out of the way, holding the sick bag…you know the drill. Eventually she was settled enough to run her through the scan. And so we waited in the hospital cafe, drank coffee and talked about what we thought it could be, but never did we think at any point that it might be anything more sinister than a persistent strain of pneumonia, pleurisy or something along those lines.

My phone rang and it was the doctor and he wanted to see me…alone. Not a good feeling, especially as I am being invited into the little room of bad news with a rather official looking doctor, obviously someone important. It can’t be a doctor’s favourite part of their job breaking the news to a mother that her daughter is in the final stages of cancer. He explained she had lesions the full length of her spine, in her fibular, clavicle, pelvis and ribs. So what does that mean? I asked as my stomach flipped. She has cancer in her bones and I am so sorry it is secondary, she also Lymphangitis carcinomatosa, which is a secondary lung cancer. SECONDARY???  What was the primary? They had no answer for me and believe it or not it still had not totally sunk in that my daughter, my beautiful Erin was going to die.

The hospital staff at Joondalup Health Campus was terrific, they arranged for a folder bed for me and I was able to stay in the room with her. I never left her side. Many tests later they were able to tell me it was ovarian cancer and this was why it never showed up in any tests. It’s a silent killer. Over the following week the pain management team put a concoction of heavy duty painkillers together and she was placed on a blood thinner as they realised that the clots in her lungs were breaking up and she was having strokes. Once she was stable enough the news was broken to her that she was terminal. She sat there for what seemed like an eternity, sighed and said “Well that sucks” she then groaned and said “my poor family”. By the end of the week we had made the guest room at home into her room, I had let work know what was going on and I was on extended leave. Erin was allowed to come home with me as her full time carer. She was home with us for nearly two weeks and in that time we were up at King Edward Memorial Hospital for tests, Sir Charles Gardiner Hospital…for tests and she managed to get a weekend in of socialising with her now devastated friends. On Monday, June 7 Erin got out of bed came down to the lounge and sat down just pulling at her dressing gown. She had a confused and disorientated look and behaviour about her that sparked fear in me. “Look at me Erin” she looked up but there was something wrong. During the previous week she had begun to ask me to ask her to say her alphabet on several occasions when she became aware that she was having a stroke. The confusion would be very short lived and there had not been any physical effects. Now I was asking her to say the alphabet and she was staring at me blankly limply pulling at her dressing gown. I realised she wasn’t pulling at it she was trying to tie it up and her right hand was not working. SHE’S HAD A STROKE JIM GET THE CAR!!! And back to hospital we went. Up at the ward they had a room ready for her and the folding bed was already there waiting, they knew I wasn’t going anywhere. Erin did not recover her speech; she only managed to say umm umm umm umm and then would give up out of frustration. A speech therapist created a book for her so that she was able to communicate. The most beautiful sound was one morning she needed to get my attention and I heard maaaaaam and there she was sitting on the edge of the bed with a lopsided grin. She was given a calliper and taught how to use it and for a short while we thought she was going to have some more time at home. But that was not to do, the next day she was back to where we had started from, not interested in leaving her room, exhausted and just want to sleep and watch TV. A week to the day she had another serious stroke while she was in the shower, which robbed her of even more communication ability. She decline from there, that was June 16, June 17 she was in a coma and we were keeping a bedside vigil and at 2:00am on June 18 my beautiful beautiful Erin slipped away from us. I was kissing her goodbye at the time and she opened her eyes and for a brief moment I thought she was looking at me, but she was gone. She was just 27 years old.

Erin believed in life after death and told me she was going to do whatever it took to let me know she was ok. The week that she lay in the hospital dying it rained solidly, it felt very fitting. At 10:00am on the morning she had died my husband Jim came running in from the front grabbed my hand and said you have got to see this. Right in front of our house was the most beautiful vivid full rainbow, and there was a rainbow every day leading up to and on the day of her funeral. Every time I see a rainbow when something significant is going on in my life I say to myself, that’s Erin letting me know its ok. Thanks to my shutter happy hubby I have a beautifully framed photo of that first rainbow, Erin’s Rainbow, up on the wall along with other significant photos. Over 130 people came to Erin’s funeral, I had no idea that so many people existed in our private lives.

Seven weeks before I was sitting on a bench at work with a woman whose 25 year old daughter was dying of cervical cancer. I had no idea what that would be like and was not about to try and pretend that I did. I went back to work four weeks later and there was this woman, her daughter had died three days before Erin. She got up out of her chair in group, crossed the room and hugged me, looked me in the eye and nodded, then went back to her chair without saying a word.

Erin wanted the world to know how silent ovarian cancer is but never got the chance. She bequeathed $5,000 to the ward that cared for her and $5,000 for the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund. I tell the world about the silence of this cancer any way I can. I speak at fundraising and awareness raising events and I tell Erin’s story and how she lived 5 weeks from the day of diagnosis due to the ambiguity of the symptoms.

Thank you

Karen Finnegan