Birthday Dinner Turned into a Cancer Diagnosis: Her Story

The dinner was meant to celebrate a milestone. Catherine Vander Cammen, a social educator then living in the UK, had turned 60, and she and her husband sat down to mark the occasion. Instead, the evening turned quiet. Hours earlier, a phone call had confirmed what she had already sensed. “I just put the phone down, and I said, ‘I think I’ve got cancer,’” she recalls. “I cried and cried for hours. My whole life was collapsing in front of me. I could not believe this was happening.”

Her story, along with those of two other women living in the UAE, is featured in Gulf News’s report on women fighting breast cancer and reclaiming their lives: https://gulfnews.com/lifestyle/uae-women-on-fighting-breast-cancer-and-reclaiming-their-lives-im-not-going-anywhere-1.500705694

For Catherine, the diagnosis had begun with a small change she refused to ignore. After a shower one day, she noticed her right nipple was inverted. She went straight to her GP and pressed for a mammogram. “They told me to stay longer,” she says. “They took me for a biopsy, and we waited several days for the results.” The results arrived on her birthday. The birthday dinner went ahead anyway, just the two of them, both numb.

The word cancer itself registers in the body as a threat, explains Hiba Salem, a psychologist specialising in psycho-oncology and palliative psychology at Sage Clinics. The nervous system shifts into survival mode. “That is why so many people leave that first appointment unable to recall what was said. Feeling numb or strangely calm is common too. I see this as the mind pacing itself, letting the reality in gradually rather than all at once.” Uncertainty, she adds, is crippling, and the mind rehearses the worst possible outcome. “Patients tell me it feels like preparation, but in practice it means living through bad news many times over.”

Catherine’s treatment moved faster than her acceptance. Surgeons did not want to wait, and she underwent a mastectomy of her right breast, with 17 lymph nodes dissected. “When they removed the bandages, I couldn’t recognise my body. The doctor said it was normal, but I just felt a new anxiety,” she says. Discharged the next day with instructions about a prosthesis, a specialist bra and follow-up treatment, she attended a session at Macmillan Cancer Support to demystify the chemotherapy ahead. A PICC line was fitted in her left arm, where it stayed for more than six months. At one point her neutrophil count dropped so low she was admitted to isolation, at risk of infection and death.

Amid the swings between physical pain, psychological pain and numbness, she made herself a promise: “I am going to fight this.” Armed with a journal and therapy, she rode what she calls a rollercoaster of hospital trips and infections, admitted three times, smiling through it even when she lost her hair. She researched ways to manage nausea, peripheral neuropathy and the blow to her self-esteem, and applied for a voluntary position at Macmillan. Fifteen months later, cancer returned, this time in her left breast. Caught early, it required another surgery, and the chemotherapy was easier to manage. Today Catherine lives in the UAE and belongs to a support group for women facing breast cancer, led by Lamya Gabr.

For Maria Sirotinina, a MedTech leader and biomedical engineer, the diagnosis came in June 2022 at 36. “I thought, obviously, it could not happen to me. There was no history of breast cancer in my family,” she says. A full-body check-up and ultrasound revealed a suspicious mass, and a biopsy confirmed it. Her fear was the one any patient would recognise: “Am I going to survive?” She stayed focused, starting chemotherapy in July 2022 and finishing treatment by the end of that year. When chemotherapy stripped away her sense of control, her family encouraged her to get out and slowly become active again. One thought took hold: she wanted to live her best life. “I would just believe, today is the best day.”

Maria researched ways to keep her hair during chemotherapy and used cold caps. She still has her tattooed eyebrows, but what matters more, she says, is feeling beautiful inside, because that changes how you look at yourself. “I did a photoshoot too,” she says, with warm pride.

By contrast, Maelisa Hall’s first symptom was one few would connect with breast cancer: itchiness. In 2021 she found a lump, and her GP immediately sent her to hospital for an ultrasound and four biopsies. A week later came the verdict: Stage 3 triple-negative breast cancer. At Mediclinic City Hospital she endured 16 rounds of chemotherapy, immunotherapy every three weeks, three blood transfusions, weekly injections, a lumpectomy and 20 rounds of radiation. Her determination echoed the others’. “I said, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’”

The pain surprised her by arriving late, only as treatment progressed. More frightening was learning how many symptoms she had never known about: inverted nipples, severe itchiness, discharge. “Now I just say, the moment you feel something is not right, just go and get it checked. Don’t wait.” She has heard women say they fear mammograms because of the discomfort. “It does, but chemo hurts worse, operations hurt. Please don’t be scared,” she urges, while keeping up with her own regular checks and scans despite the fear of recurrence.

Meanwhile, Salem notes that the end of treatment does not always end the emotional strain. “Emotional recovery often lags behind physical recovery, sometimes by months.” Persistent low mood, panic attacks, withdrawal, avoiding follow-up appointments or compulsively checking for signs of recurrence are all reasons to seek help. “Seeking support is part of good cancer care, not a sign of failing at it,” she says. Even a good prognosis does not make treatment less grueling; fatigue, hormonal shifts and poor sleep all weigh on mood. What she hears most often is guilt, the belief that others have it worse. But gratitude and distress can sit side by side, and giving yourself permission to find it hard, she says, often eases the load. For women like Catherine, Maria and Maelisa, the question now is what comes after survival, and how they will shape it.