“It was the best thing, knowing that after all of the treatment and surgery I’d still be able to have kids in the future. It really got me through. If I didn’t have my eggs frozen, I think treatment would’ve broken me. Knowing that I had a future with my boyfriend where we could have kids, it meant a lot to me.”
This fertility treatment, which is now funded by the Irish Cancer Society, gave Aoife Cooper from Meath a sense of hope as she went through cancer treatment after receiving her diagnosis at age 15.
Now aged 21, Aoife has adjusted to life after cancer and credits the Irish Cancer Society’s Creative Arts Therapy programme with being a significant help. The programme provides therapy to young people affected by cancer, and it is led by their own creativity and their own artistic preferences.
“I loved it, because I’d always loved art in school and I felt like I was safe in art therapy, and like I could talk about my experience,” says Aoife. “Before I started it, I didn’t know if I would or wouldn’t talk about how I was feeling, but I started opening up, and being able to talk while I was doing art. It really helped me a lot, it was really good for me to be able to go there and I really enjoyed it a lot.”
In 2019, Aoife, then aged 15, started to experience extreme fatigue and hip and leg pain. She was a fit and active teenager who played Gaelic football for Meath, and couldn’t understand what was causing her symptoms.
“Every day, I felt so tired, I felt like I could barely move,” says Aoife. “Then I started to get pain in my hip – I later found out that was where the tumour was, it was the size of a melon. It was a pain that wouldn’t ease. It would go into my hamstring and down my leg. I couldn’t sleep at night because of the pain, so I thought that was why I was so exhausted all the time.
“When I got home from school, I’d go straight to sleep, set an alarm to go football training, get up again and then sleep in the car on the way to training. My lifelong dream was to play GAA for Meath, but when the fatigue kicked in, I got so unfit and out of breath so easily. One day, I looked in the mirror and on one side of my body everything was straight down and normal, but on the other side my hip was way out.
“We went to my GP, and I was also playing camogie at the time, so the doctor thought it was a sports injury. But the pain kept getting worse. They gave me a cream and some painkillers, but it did not help with the pain, and the fatigue was worse – I felt like a zombie when I was in school. I remember telling my friends that I just had this feeling that it wasn’t a sports injury, because it was rock solid and not soft and tender.”
The cream and painkillers didn’t stop Aoife’s pain, so she went to A&E with her mother to get a scan to find out what was causing it.
“I spoke to a nurse there and she asked me if I’d had a bang that could’ve caused the big lump on my hip and I said no, I hadn’t had a bang. I got a scan, and they said I had a suspected tumour, but I was completely in denial about it. I said no, it can’t be, it must be a sports injury like everyone else said before.”
Aoife was in her Junior Cert year at the time, and returned to hospital before her exams started, to get a biopsy. She remembers being in the hospital waiting room and studying for her English exam, which was the next day.
“My parents got the biopsy results that Thursday but didn’t want to tell me because I was doing my exams. I believe they wanted to wait because they didn’t know how to tell me. They knew there was no easy way of saying it,” says Aoife. “That Sunday, my parents sat me down and told me I had cancer. It was a rare bone cancer called Ewing’s sarcoma. I remember thinking I’d have to get chemo, and I’d lose all of my hair, and then I started worrying about if I’d ever be able to have children.
“I remembered that my friend’s aunty had been through breast cancer and had chemo, and she couldn’t have kids. I decided I wanted to get my eggs frozen, so I did injections every day for two weeks and froze my eggs. I’d only had my period for a year at that stage, so we managed to freeze 33 eggs.”
Aoife was the first adolescent girl in Children’s Health Ireland who was able to avail of fertility preservation in Ireland.
After this, Aoife started her cancer treatment which included chemotherapy, proton beam therapy, surgery and radiotherapy over the course of a year.
“After chemo, I went to Germany for proton beam therapy. It was a targeted therapy, and they told me I wouldn’t be able to have kids because one of my ovaries would be dead, and it made me so happy that I was able to tell them that it was fine, I’d already had my eggs frozen.
“Then I went to Birmingham for surgery to remove the tumour, because by that time it was small enough to be removed. They ended up taking out the tumour and only shaved a little bit of the bone, so I didn’t need to get a hip replacement. After that, I went back home and had radiotherapy because some of the cancer had spread to my lungs.”
Aoife’s treatment was a success, and she completed it in June 2020, just shy of a year after she’d been diagnosed. She recalls having mixed feelings when she rang the bell in Children’s Health Ireland Crumlin, marking the end of her treatment.
“The day I rang the bell when I finished my treatment was the toughest day of my life, because I knew I had to go back to ‘normal’ life. I felt trapped in school and had really bad anxiety, and I had really bad chemo brain – I couldn’t make sense of what people were saying when they were talking to me, or when they texted me. I felt so isolated. I had survived cancer, and now I had to go back to a normal life and trying to be a normal kid. This journey has taught me so much about myself. I believe life is like a rollercoaster, there will be good days and bad days, ups and downs but no matter what you will always end up back on top.”
Aoife has been cancer-free for almost five years. She gets a scan every six months, and they’ve all come back clear. When asked what advice she has for other young people who are dealing with cancer, Aoife says they should approach treatment like a job and try to stay positive.
“Take it as it is – it’s not the end of the world, things can work out,” she says. “When I started treatment, I didn’t see a way out, but you’re doing your treatment to live, not just to survive. You’ll still have so much life outside the hospital. You can still go for walks, or for coffee with your friends. Just think of it as a little job; you’re just going into hospital, doing your hours, and going home, and your family and friends will help you to get through it. My chances of survival were very low, but things do work out. Everything will be OK, you’ve got this!”
