When it comes to sport, Sally Wood is a winner. But she’s also an inspiration to women everywhere who are battling or have battled breast cancer. Here, she shares her remarkable story and urges everyone to support the Pink Ladies’ Sunset Coastal Walk. Gemma Hockey reports (Click here to download the walk entry form as a PDF.)
SHE’S one of Guernsey’s favourite sportswomen, having fought her way to become a national badminton champion and now enjoying her reign as a top name in local showjumping circles. But the greatest challenge for Sally Wood began the day she learned the news that she had breast cancer.
Today, she is endorsing the Pink Ladies’ Sunset Walk as the perfect opportunity to raise the bar on breast cancer awareness in the island and boost funds for treating lymphoedema, a condition linked to the disease.
Sally was crowned English national badminton champion in 1988, making her the first mum ever to collect the title.
The win followed a stream of earlier successes, including medals at the Commonwealth Games in 1982. It also represented a victory over a separate but long-running battle with manic depression.
But the shock news in 2004 brought a whole new challenge for Sally, then aged 42, who was to face a new test on two fronts.
The breast cancer diagnosis had triggered a more severe form of depression, known as bipolar disorder, which sees patients fluctuate between periods of intense depression or mania, interspersed by periods of relative calm.
‘I’d found a lump when I was in the bath one night. I was using liquid soap, which was unusual for me because I normally used solid soap, but as I was washing myself, I felt it on my left side.
‘At first you think it’s nothing but I nagged myself and went to the doctor to get it checked.’
Sally had a mammogram, which didn’t show the lump, but the ultrasound that followed showed that she had a mass.
‘Quite often, a lump won’t show up on a mammogram on younger women because the muscle tissue in the breast is quite dense.
‘The biopsy confirmed a few days later that the tissue was malignant and that the best option was to have a lumpectomy, followed by chemotherapy and radiotherapy.’
Sally described it as the shock of her life.
‘I was fit and healthy.
‘I thought, why should I have cancer?’
As the trauma sparked one of her most difficult episodes of bipolar disorder, she was signed off work and forced to wait until her mental health improved before she could undergo chemotherapy.
‘I couldn’t believe it.
Article posted on 26th April, 2007 - 12.00am
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