Words: Sarah Tarca // @tarca

Images: @tealily for @nataliemariejewellery

Courtesy of Elle Halliwell // @ellehalliwell

image: @tealily for @nataliemariejewellery

There’s resilience, and then there’s Elle Halliwell resilience. The kind that looks in the face of a cancer diagnosis, and a simultaneous pregnancy discovery only to decide that she will both fight and birth… and come out the other side not only a mother to a healthy baby boy, but with a whole new life perspective.

The journalist, author and founder of Auricle Ear Seeds is nothing short of awe-inspiring, taking a year that would kick even the most hearty of us down, and turning it into fuel to change her life, her career, and her mental health. Here, she shares her incredible journey with us.

Health was Never a PRIority for me…

I’d previously lived a lived a life where it was so low on list, so when I was diagnosed with cancer in 2016 I thought “wow I really need to shift my priorities around” – and I did within two weeks. The day after I found out I was pregnant (which was two days after I was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer) I cleaned out my beauty cupboard, my kitchen, O got rid of all the Teflon pans and switched to natural cleaning products. Since then, it’s been a gradual refinement though. I now know that not all natural products are good for you and vice versa but at the time I just wanted everything gone.

the moment I decided i needed to deep dive into my health…

Was after speaking with my heomotologist and asking what else could I do (in addition to the treatment) to negate the side effects of the cancer, and get my body in the best shape to fight it. He said: “just take the drugs”. I was gobsmacked that there was no suggestions about specific foods I should add or eliminate, nothing about anti inflammatories. I pushed for more but he just said “don’t eat grapefruit” (apparently it reacts to a lot of medications and can reduce the effectiveness of it).

I got so angry, but then I thought no, I’m going to empower myself with the knowledge. So I decided to do a nutition course, and signed up to study a one-year coaching practice but I felt like that wasn’t enough, so I went on to study and advanced diploma in natropathy.

“I feel like having cancer itself was a self help tool to really uncover the strength that everyone has…”

I wanted to make sure that what I was putting into my body wasn’t just good for me but for the baby too…

But when you’ve got cancer that’s’ tricky. I was in such a unique position, I think at the time I found one other women who had my specific disease so I had to be my own guinea pig. Since then, I haven’t stopped trying to figure out what does and doesn’t work for me, and what I now know is that what works for me is unique – it’s not one size fits all.

Each body thrives on something different so tuning into your body is really important and I also think that once a year everyone shoul get a complete blood test that shows all your blood counts because your normal might be different to everyone else.

I found out I had cancer sort of by accident…

I got a bout of gastro and went to the GP for a doctor’s certificate, and while I was there I had a chat to him about having a blood test because we’d started talking about trying for children. My test results came back showing I had high platlate levels. At first we tought it was because of the gastro, so I got re-tested but they were higher again… so I was lucky in that way becse my platelets had only just started to rise. I was referred to a heomotologist and it took about five weeks to get an appointment. Clearly we had not been careful during that time and I had done a test the week before my diagnosis so I honestly didn’t think I was. But something made me take another one… I think because I thought you know, “what could be the worst possible situation right now?”. So I did another test and it came back positive.

I feel like having cancer itself was a self help tool…

To really uncover the strength that everyone has. If someone had asked me before if I could’ve dealt with this, I’d say hell no. But you just deal with it. Day by day. Going through something like this, for me at least, it put me in an automatic state of mindfulness. It put me right back in the present. You don’t know what’s happening tomorrow, you cant plan for the next year, you literally have only this moment when you know you’re feeling ok. I didn’t even know if the baby was going to be able to survive in a body with cancer.

“You don’t know what’s happening tomorrow, you cant plan for the next year, you literally have only this moment when you know you’re feeling ok..”

Every day I woke up I took a dep breath and said “you have today”…

And suddenly that anxiety I’d dealt with for more than a decade disappeared. Up until this point I’d only heard about mindfulness and it didn’t really resonate with me, and then all of a sudden I had this epiphany because I realised I’d been practicing mindfulness without realising it. I was no longer thinking about the future and trying to predict scenarios… I didn’t care what people might be thinking about me. I was just so grateful to be here, to have a baby healthily growng inside of me and to be able to get out of bed each day. And everything just felt amazing – the food I ate just tasted great every breath I took just felt different and I felt more alive. My head wasn’t somewhere else all the time catastrophising.

I feel like there was no anxiety after being diagnosed but there was panic and shock…

Cancer was just so out of the realm of possibility, it wasn’t in my family, I had no predispositions to the disease, I just never thought it would happen to me. But even then, the anxiety just didn’t show up like it had in the past. And it didn’t come back until a year after I had Tor which made me realise that the newfound mindfulness I had found wasn’t something I could take for granted. So now I have to practice it all the time with walks, self care, exercise, good food and reminding myself to be in the now. For me, anxiety was often triggered by overwhelm and ruminating on things that can happen. So I try to be in the best shape I can be to fight this, and that’s the best I can do. It’s so ironic being such an anxious person, that receiving news like that has been the thing that grounds me.

Then I had to make the decision about my pregnancy…

My first instinct was to do what the doctor told me (which was to terminate) because that’s what you do. Ive always been someone who obeys authority and I felt myself doing that when I was in the office being given the choice. It was my husband who stepped in and kind of kicked me under the table and said we’d get back to them, because he knew I was in shock. We went home and began to research, to try and discover what we were really up against. He actually found an expert down in Adelaide who was a world expert in my particular cancer so we went there for a second opinion. He agreed with my hematologist, but he also advised that there was a chance of keeping the baby and still fighting the cancer, if I took a certain medication in my third trimester. It gave me the confidence to say let’s just wait and see for a bit. I wasn’t sure if this baby was going to stay in there and it wasn’t until the 12 week mark that I thought if he could survive up until this point then how could I not give him the best chance of survival? He was showing his strength already. Once we’d officially decided, I realised I was never going to go through with a termination anyway, I’d really made the choice the moment I saw the pregnancy test. Maybe if I had a child already I might’ve chosen differently… but my choice was so unique to me. People often say to me that I’m so brave but I just made the best choice for me at that point in time.

“It wasn’t until the 12 week mark that I thought ‘if he could survive up until this point then how could I not give him the best chance of survival?’”

I’ve still got the cancer – it doesn’t go away.

There’s something called the Philadelphia chromosome that has switched on in my body and it’s producing the cancer cells… and at this point they haven’t found a cure. I’m still undergoing treatment which is suppressing the production of cancer cells in my body. It’s been considered one of the miracle drugs in cancer therapy over the last decade. Extended the life expectancy of someone with my cancer from 3-5 years survival rate to decades. But it’s always there, it’s always a reminder. And in one way it’s a good reminder because it’s always in the back of my mind reminding me that there’s always the possibility tomorrow will never come, so make sure you live the day to the most you can. Rather than let the fear get to me, it’s a reminder of how lucky I am to still be here and not to take anything for granted.

I don’t even recognise the me from four years ago…

I think we just put so much pressure on ourselves to be everything all the time. When you’re at the beginning of your career you think you have to work 12 hour days to get to the top think that when you get there life will be perfect and you wont want for anything else. But then you do get there and realise you’re not happier and it hasn’t fulfilled your life. I think a lot of peopel get to their early 30s and stand on top of the mountain they climbed and are disappointed by the views. And I didn’t enjoy the view on the way up either

My biggest learning has been…

That I think I was too busy being focused on external validation and what other people thought of me, my achievements, my career and what constitutes a beautiful person, rather than looking deep down at what I thought. My values had not been driving my choices for years – it was more about my ego – and I think that led to a lot of the anxiety. I was living in complete misalignment to who I was. Now I pause a lot more before I do things and think: “am I doing this for my ego or is it what I really want as a human being, is it what my soul wants?” I find when I do this I make decisions that I am really happy with.

Of course it’s impacted how I parent Tor…

I didn’t want him to think he was a miracle child, I wanted to raise him as a second child in a way, to just go with the flow and not be so anxious. So I tried to take the approach of thinking, “if this was my second child would I be worried about him eating food off the ground?” Probably not. When I have my days with him I try and be present with him completely, and on the flip side I then don’t allow myself to feel guilty on the days I have to work. I’m in work mode for that and mum mode for the other. One of the things I realise is that you cant be a perfect Mum, and I’m actually fine with that now. I choose not to beat myself up about that anymore.

Elle Halliwell: Resilience, anxiety and the unexpected upside of cancer