‘I asked myself why. “Why was I doing all this?” “Why was I working so hard?” The first year after breast cancer is always challenging and confronting, and I was starting to question where I was going and was it worth it?’
What if breast cancer is just the start of an incredible journey?
For Meredith Campbell, being diagnosed with breast cancer has given her the ride of her life—literally. It was the trigger for what has become an amazing story.
Meredith and fellow breast cancer survivor Megan Dwyer created Amazon Heart, an international organisation that celebrates life for survivors of breast cancer and at the same time changes the world through advocacy, fundraising and local community projects.
Before being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000, Meredith had been involved with a variety of not-for-profit charities and had worked at the Cancer Council for a number of years. Consequently, she was aware of breast cancer and its impact on our society but had never imagined it would touch her so directly.
‘I found it very personally challenging to go from working for a cause to actually being a part of that cause. It was a big psychological adjustment for me and even more so as a young woman. I never expected to have to confront dangers to my health, face my mortality or to question my view of the future at this age,’ she says.
At 33 years old, Meredith was an international sailor and recognised around the world as a respected marketing professional. ‘I was fit and healthy, had a six-year-old son and, with no family history, breast cancer was the last thing I had thought would happen to me. It made no sense to me at all.’
It wasn’t until 18 months after her cancer diagnosis, on a charity walk in the USA, that Meredith found a deeper meaning to life—one that sent her in a totally new direction.
‘I’d gone to America to participate in the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. Over 3000 women walk 100 kilometres in three days, and it is a spectacularly successful fundraising event. At the time, I was working with Kids Help Line and I went over to look at the Avon concept, thinking that by participating in it I could see if the principle could be adapted and brought back here to Brisbane.
‘I went with a little trepidation and lined up at five in the morning with all the other women—with no personal disclosure that I, too, was a cancer survivor, only admitting to working for a charity in Australia. On the starting line I was introduced to a young woman who told me she had had breast cancer and, without thinking, I blurted out, “Me, too—you look so good.” I always struggled with breast cancer being a part of my identity and even for this event I had left my “Survivor” shirt and hat back in my bags—not really wanting to own up to it,’ she admits.
She did eventually wear the ‘Survivor’ shirt and found that it did bring an unexpected bond and connection with those other people who’d gone through a similar journey. ‘I’d be standing at traffic lights, and in the 30 seconds they took to change to green, many women would come up and tell me I looked great or encourage me to stay strong. It felt good.
‘This event started to make some sense of my diagnosis. I found myself no longer denying that I had had breast cancer but able to own it and accept that cancer was part of who I was—but it certainly was not my identity,’ Meredith explains. ‘And this was probably what led me to the path of Amazon Heart.’
Meredith admits that the first time she talked with the media about her personal story and the founding of Amazon Heart she was very emotional and found it extremely difficult. ‘But,’ she says, ‘the more you tell your cancer story, the less power it has over you. Amazon Heart became a part of my history and this is how I have dealt with being a young woman diagnosed with breast cancer.’
Meredith remembers the exact moment she was told she had cancer. It was 10am on 28 September 2000 and she was at home watching Jenny Armstrong and Belinda Stowell win Australia’s first ever Olympic gold medal in sailing. ‘I had raced in the 470s class, which is the one the girls raced, and so I was glued to the television when the phone rang. It was my doctor telling me that I had breast cancer. To say I was shocked is an understatement.
‘I had been to see him after finding a lump in my breast. So I had the screening mammogram and the fine-needle biopsy and I stayed home from work the following day to wait for the results—and of course to watch Jenny and Belinda sail their final race. I was expecting the lump was a cyst—certainly nothing serious,’ she says.
‘Hearing the bad news was one of those moments of raw human emotion that strips you bare. Here I was in the middle of an ecstatic moment with the girls winning gold at the Olympic Games in Sydney and I’m in my loungeroom in Brisbane being told I have breast cancer. Once reality stepped in, I was in a whirlwind doing all those things you need to organise, like calling my boss and finding a surgeon. I was thrown into the middle of a surreal world.’
Meredith was diagnosed with a Stage 2 Grade 3 tumour and large node involvement. ‘In fact I had a larger tumour in my lymph nodes than in my breast, so this was serious. I realised this was an acute diagnosis.
‘However, I also knew there are no guarantees in life and we just have to deal with what we have,’ Meredith philosophically reminds me.
She then tells me about a quote from the Lord of the Rings film that sustained her through this challenge. ‘In the first movie, there is a scene where the troop is going through the mines of Moria. It is dark and it’s scary, and Frodo is sitting there saying he wished this had never happened and that the Ring had never come to him. He didn’t want to deal with it. And Gandalf says to him, “Well, that’s what everyone says in a situation like this; but that’s not the choice you get to make. The choice is what you will do with the time you were given.”
‘For me, I didn’t choose to get breast cancer, and of course no one chooses to get cancer. I can’t change the fact I did, and so the choice for me was what would I do with the time I had? What would I do with each day that lay ahead of me?’
Once diagnosed, Meredith then made her choices. She had a lumpectomy and an auxillary dissection. That was followed by a three-month course of Epirubicin chemotherapy, then three months of radiation treatment. She finished the regime with three more months of chemotherapy, this time using Taxol.
‘So that pretty much wiped me out for most of a year. I was pretty angry having to go through chemo, but I psyched myself up to see it as a challenge. The whole nature of the treatment was quite depressing, especially as a young woman,’ she says. ‘I’d go in and be the youngest person in the room. I’d look around and think that I didn’t belong there.’
She tolerated the chemo quite well and the only time she felt nauseous or unwell was during the final treatment of the first round of treatments. ‘I think that was a psychological purging. I got home and hurled my guts out and shouted “That’s done!”
‘During that time, I went through a phase of eating lots of McDonald’s food, which didn’t help with my weight gain, but it made me happy,’ she laughs.
‘Radiation gave me a little physical break as it wasn’t so taxing on my body. It also gave my hair a chance to start growing back—although it was very dark and afro-style curls, which was kind of freaky. But then it all fell out again when I had the second round of treatments. By the time I’d finished the second three months of chemotherapy, I had no hair or eyebrows or eyelashes. It’s a bad look—you can get away with having no hair and just looking a bit butch, but without the eyelashes and eyebrow it is just bizarre.’
Meredith chuckles as she recalls that the second time her hair returned, it was totally grey, ‘So I quickly dyed it and I have absolutely no idea what colour it is now. When your hair grows back it is just like a foreign object. I suddenly had curls where I had always had straight hair,’ she says with a shake of her now auburn waves.
All the way through her treatments Meredith had felt that she just needed to get through each day. When they were all finished, she decided that her life would go back to what it was. Because it was important to her to maintain normality in her life, she worked most of the time during the medication period.
Just before her diagnosis, Meredith had been asked to go overseas as a guest speaker at an international conference. She was then to travel to India as part of her job with a not-for-profit organisation. That had been put on hold. ‘But as soon as I had done with the medical whirlwind, I was desperate to reclaim my life,’ she says.
‘So six weeks after treatments I went to India—a country that can transform you. I thought I’d had a very difficult year but I wasn’t really prepared for the shock of going out to the remote villages. The people lived in abject poverty, but I was astonished that they lived their lives with such hope and joy. They were full of life with no despair. They were looking for something better in their lives, but not miserable at all. Every day they were just trying to make the best of their situation. I had never been into such a poor place that had no self-pity. It actually transformed me and helped me to realise that there are certainly worse things you can go through than breast cancer. It really picked me up,’ she acknowledges humbly.
Returning from India, Meredith threw herself back into her career. ‘I’ve always been a dedicated worker and was very successful. But I then had an epiphany moment. I asked myself why. “Why was I doing all this?” “Why was I working so hard?” The first year after breast cancer is always challenging and confronting, and I was starting to question where I was going and was it worth it?’ she says.
‘After the Avon walk, I had put my body under a lot of stress—walking over 100 kilometres on hard pavements in intense heat over three days was tough, and I collapsed the arch in my right foot. It was an agonising pain, like a knife was being driven into it. Now—as anyone who has been diagnosed with cancer will tell you—as soon as you get a sore area, you immediately think, “Bone cancer, and this is it!”’
With lots of external stresses also happening at this time, Meredith put off seeing a doctor for two months, ‘in case it was bad news’. Finally she decided to go. ‘I thought that all the stress I was creating was certainly not good for my health and I reasoned that if the news was bad and the damn thing had come back, maybe I would look back and wonder what I had been doing with my life. Luckily, it turned out to be a physical injury, which healed fine, but that conversation with myself had far-reaching effects. I asked myself if this is the way I really wanted to live my life and would I have regrets?’
The answer to that soul-searching question was yes: she would have regrets. Armed with this self-knowledge, Meredith knew that nothing less than a fulfilling and purposeful life was acceptable to her, so she resigned from her job and decided to work as a consultant. This would give her far more flexibility with her time and allow her to discover her life direction.
That weekend after her resignation, in 2002, she went to Sydney to compete in the sailing regatta at the Gay Games. ‘I was watching the American sailing team walking around, all smug and confident, when I noticed one of the women was bald and had temporary tattoos covering her head. My teammates were joking about the “scary Americans”, but I saw that she had no eyebrows or eyelashes and I immediately recognised a woman on chemo,’ she says.
‘When I was bald I stood out, and I found it difficult wherever I was, be it at work, at the supermarket or just walking around the street. People found the need to come up to me and tell me all of their most gruesome stories about cancer. They were often very intrusive, asking questions about what I had and what was wrong with me. And I’ve noticed, with these strangers, that everyone dies in their world. Thank you for sharing that as I sit with my six-year-old son! So on seeing this woman at sailing, I was understanding of her privacy and didn’t want to pry,’ says Meredith of her initial meeting with Megan Dwyer.
‘About halfway through the regatta, I happened to be sitting beside Megan and we started chatting. It came up that she had breast cancer. We found we had shared similar experiences as young women battling breast cancer, so by the end of the competition Megan and I had become very good friends.’
Megan returned to California but Meredith and she kept in touch via email and telephone. ‘She was the first young woman who I had met with breast cancer, and it was wonderful to be able to share some of our many common interests. We also had similar attitudes. We both knew we wanted to get back into an active life. Megan was only five weeks out of chemo when she did a triathlon. Now that is one gutsy woman!’
But getting on with things was how both Meredith and Megan approached their life post-cancer. ‘You almost feel superhuman. You want to do everything. I went to India in searing heat. What was I going to do? Sit at home and feel miserable? Of course not. My life is a work in progress and I was trying to make sense of who I was and who I will be,’ Meredith explains.
‘After the very lengthy email exchanges about what it is really like to be young and have breast cancer, and how we got through it all—especially as it had taken so long for us to find someone who really understood how we were feeling—Megan and I thought that it may be useful for other women to read about our journey. So we decided to collaborate and write and publish a book about our journey.
‘It was very cathartic for us to produce the book Amazon Heart—Coping with Breast Cancer Warrior Princess Style. It is very warts and all and has been quite successful. What is more important to us is that we’ve had lots of women tell us that it helped them.’
After producing the book, Meredith and Megan wondered what they could do next. Meredith had always looked for opportunities to live her life fully and after returning from India she’d got her motorcycle licence. ‘Don’t really know why. I had always been a responsible mother and very professional in my career; it was just one of those things I wanted to do before I was 40,’ she says lightly. Megan was then inspired to follow suit, also getting her licence.
‘We were then talking about ways to launch and promote the book. I’d heard of a group called the Fenceliners, who several years earlier had done an adventurous motorcycle ride around Australia with a couple of breast cancer survivors. They also did a paddle down the Murray and a bicycle ride around Tasmania. In fact, I was a little annoyed that they’d done their motorcycle ride before I was diagnosed,’ she chuckles.
Meredith thought it was a great idea, but these were older women who could afford to take lots of time to enjoy their escapades, whilst she knew that most younger women didn’t have that luxury of time off from work and family.
‘So Megan and I planned to do a one-week bike ride in California, America, from San Diego up to San Francisco. And we decided to find a motorcycle company to give us the bikes!’ she says.
‘I went off to the States and we made a few calls—hoping! Then one day we got a call from Harley Davidson in Milwaukee, who said they loved our idea. So we jumped onto a plane and met with them. They were incredibly generous right upfront. They agreed to lend us 20 brand-new motorcycles and truck them to and from the start and finish of the ride. They would provide leather jackets for all riders and even offered mechanical support along the way. They were just fantastic.’
In October 2004, with five Australian riders and 15 Americans, the dream of an adventure became a reality for the two women. They knew that the ride would be high profile, attract attention and therefore raise a lot of money. What they didn’t anticipate was the personal and emotional impact it would have on those women who took part.
‘At the end of the ride, all of the women were on a high. They said that for the first time they believed in themselves and their ability to build a new life after cancer. And then they asked where they were going next year.’
Amazingly, by Christmas the following year Harley Davidson had supported adventures in not only the USA but also in Australia and the United Kingdom. Amazon Heart Adventures had been born and was thriving. Buoyed by this success, Meredith and Megan expanded their vision as they contemplated what else they could do to empower breast cancer survivors.
‘I thought back to my times in India and I wondered if we could take breast cancer survivors into Third World countries and undertake some community building projects. Megan and I also thought about trekking adventures. So the whole Amazon Heart thing just exploded.’
I get a sense of the adrenaline surge Meredith has experienced in the course of all this expansion. From time to time she shakes her head slightly, as if even she can’t believe herself how quickly the enterprise took off.
The choice of the name and identity for these projects was the result of deep deliberation on the underpinning reason for establishing these adventures. ‘It had been very difficult for me as a young woman with breast cancer to find positivity and connection with similarminded women. I realised that at the heart of my experience was an emotional vulnerability which meant I cried quicker than before, or felt exposed to weaknesses or deep feelings more than ever before. Trying to reconcile that more vulnerable person with the independent woman I had been before cancer was a big challenge for me,’ she explains.
‘The name Amazon Heart reflected that personal exploration. Amazon represented the strong, empowered woman, and Heart was the emotional vulnerability that the breast cancer had brought. There is, of course, the ancient myth about Amazon women chopping off their right breast in order to fire their arrows more efficiently in war. So this name resonated strongly with our ideals.’
The title also sat well in the public arena, with Meredith receiving many emails from women who identified with the name telling her that they, too, were Amazon Warriors. ‘In fact, 20 women that we know of have tattooed the Amazon Heart logo onto their bodies! Now that means they have truly adopted our vision,’ she says with pride.
‘Amazon Heart symbolised transformation—giving women power over their cancer experience. I had initially thought that Amazon Heart would be a one-off ride, but it exploded overnight. It is an incorporated charity in Australia, America and the UK, with independent boards. But the reality is that everything comes back to Megan and I, and we just can’t keep doing it for ever. We need to keep our day jobs, and that’s not possible given the amount of effort we both continue to put into Amazon Heart.’
‘It literally takes all of our time after work and on weekends. I never wanted to be a huge conglomerate charity. I wanted it to be something that Megan and I did for the love of the cause, and did really well. I am passionate about the idea and very willing to share our experience and ideas because the benefits to participants are so valuable.
‘A research project, conducted by the University of Queensland and the Cancer Council, validated that for women who participated in our adventures and projects, there was a measurable positive impact that our adventures had on their outlook for the future after breast cancer. Peer support isn’t often externally validated, so this was rare and a very important finding. Indeed, it was such an exciting conclusion that Megan and I were invited to Washington to present at the World Cancer Congress and then at the UICC International Reach to Recovery Conference in Stockholm. In 2007, we also addressed the International Conference on Survivorship and Supportive Care in Cancer in Kuala Lumpur. That is a very rewarding acknowledgment for what we have done.’
Since the positive psychosocial impact of these adventures has been officially endorsed, Meredith’s ideas have been taken up around the world, with rides now taking place through South Africa and Malaysia.
At the time of our interview, Megan and Meredith are working with the Cancer Council Queensland to formulate a ‘how to’ kit based on Amazon Heart Adventures and providing the tools and logistics to get these programs up and running anywhere in the world.
Whilst taking the ideas internationally will be a wonderful legacy, the truth is that Amazon Heart is really Megan and Meredith. When they step down, will this be the end of Amazon Heart Adventures?
‘We know that we can impart so much knowledge and share our ideas with anyone who wants to replicate what we have done. But because so much of our DNA is embedded in each adventure or project, I know that Amazon Heart is really us. The exciting thing is that the concept will flourish and spread throughout the world—but we won’t be running them. And that is okay,’ Meredith says.
‘They will be successful and valuable for those who participate, and that is a wonderful feeling—knowing our ideas have rippled through the world for good.
‘This year, 2009 will be the final year. Two last rides—we think. Working full-time, I just can’t keep taking time off to run these adventures. I never say never, and perhaps we may just cut back and do fewer projects, or we may collaborate with a larger organisation that can support our administration and organisation. Don’t know—we’ll just have to see.
‘One of the other considerations that is probably camouflaged is that Amazon Heart Adventures takes a huge emotional toll on me, and on Megan. Because many of our participants have secondary cancer and are travelling with us to make every day of their lives count, we become very close. Unfortunately, from each trip, several of these women die. Having lost 15 friends in the past few years, the emotional toll—for me as a survivor—is very hard,’ Meredith says sadly.
Reflecting on the past eight years, Meredith appreciates that since being diagnosed with the deadly disease, her life has definitely changed. ‘I have grown in these past years, but I certainly wish there could have been a better way to personal development than getting breast cancer. But I am grateful that it caused me to re-evaluate a lot of things in my life. The experiences I’ve had—especially after forming Amazon Heart—have been amazing, both the bike rides and the active charity work in India.
‘To work in places like India, returning each year to the village we work in and seeing the orphanages for AIDS victims we’ve built and the changes we have made in the quality of their life is very humbling,’ she adds.
‘Riding bikes around the world with amazing women on inspiring trips and at the same time raising over US$650,000 for charity also gives me a sense of pride and achievement.
‘But when I look back and reflect on what has been most rewarding for me, it is the legacy of hope for women diagnosed with breast cancer. It is that inner transformation that Amazon Heart has been able to create in the lives of over 200 women who have participated in our journeys. That makes me feel really good.
‘Amazon Heart changed the direction of my life. I’ve grown enormously as a woman. But breast cancer is a journey. It doesn’t end—it is there for the rest of my life. But because of research and greater awareness, more and more women are enjoying life after breast cancer, and there is a greater focus on survivorship. More and more women are choosing how to live their lives in an active and positive manner after cancer,’ she says. ‘That’s why Amazon Heart filled such an important niche.’
Perhaps the final word on Meredith’s journey comes from her son, Dexter, who was only six years old when Meredith was diagnosed in 2000. He has always been very supportive of his mum and everything she does.
‘Recently, Dexter had to do a school project on the most inspirational person in the world. He did it on me. That’s when you know you’ve done something worthwhile,’ she says, beaming with pride.
Amazon Heart was indeed the start of an incredible journey for Meredith Campbell—but, more importantly, the start of an incredible journey of hope and inspiration for the thousands of women with Amazon hearts throughout the world.