In 2014, during a routine echocardiogram, Sue had a heart attack and was immediately transferred to the Royal Melbourne Hospital. She counts her blessings about when and where it happened: ‘I was so lucky. The next morning I had open-heart surgery and they discovered I had five blockages. I didn’t know I had that many parts to be blocked!’ With a quizzical look on her face, she says, ‘At the same time, my kidneys failed. Somehow my kidney function had dropped to 12 per cent, which certainly puts a question mark over whether I would have survived if I had given one of my kidneys to Danielle’. Such ‘What if …?’ questions still lurk in Sue’s mind, frequently creeping unannounced into her comments.
Sue spent ten days in an intensive care unit, receiving copious amounts of strong medication and other treatment in order to reverse the kidney failure and improve organ function, unable to do much except hear what was going on around her. ‘It was quite traumatic’, says Colin North. ‘After that, she made an absolute decision to control her life. She was not interested in dying or going on dialysis so, in response, she listened to her doctors. Properly.’
Sue admits that her kidney specialist, Anna, gave her such a fright that she became absolutely determined to do something about it: ‘I had a male oncologist, endocrinologist and cardiologist but, on 14 June 2014, it took a woman to give me the advice. She’s the only person apart from Danielle who gave it to me straight’.
Sue was confronted by her long-term prospects: unless she wanted to go on dialysis for good, she simply had to lose weight. The chemotherapy used to treat the Hodgkin’s lymphoma, along with the daily injections of insulin and her restricted ability to do exercise, had severely impacted on Sue’s size. She had ballooned to 120 kilograms, nearly double what was healthy for a woman of her height, frame and age.
Sue admits the truth hurt. She cried all night after Anna delivered her opinion: ‘I felt very sorry for myself. Danielle’s words came back to me. She could be quite harsh and she used to say, “Mum, have a good look at yourself. You need to lose weight, you’re a hypocrite”. It hurt at the time but what Danielle said about my weight was the truth. How could I live by example and be a leader if I can’t do it myself? What sort of leader was I if I didn’t practise what I was preaching?’ By the following morning, Sue had made a decision. She said to herself, ‘Stop the tears and pull your finger out. Do something’.
The first step was to take control of her exercise and diet habits. ‘There was quite a simple starting point’, says Sue. ‘I needed to cut in half what I was eating and I had to get moving.’ Her illnesses aside, the decades of working at a frenetic pace, punctuated by frequent and regular events, had taken their toll. Sue had to recalibrate her diet and overall lifestyle, not an easy challenge given that most days in her diary typically involved at least one or two functions that revolved around breakfast, lunch or dinner—if not the ‘trifecta’ of all three.
Nonetheless, Sue became very strict about what she put in her mouth. The doctors gave her the information and the tools to do this, in particular helping her to understand the appropriate volume of food to consume. ‘I learned that we only really need half of what is on the plate’, she says. ‘The key is really to change old eating behaviours and, for me, it was particularly about volume. We really don’t need much. It’s not about fad diets or combinations or anything tricky. Of course, it was difficult at first, but it got easier.’ And she walked every day, sometimes for hours.
Sue also took the decision to undergo bariatric surgery to assist the weight-loss process, conspiring with a close friend who had similar weight issues and was prepared to undergo the procedure and report back. However, Sue emphasises that undergoing a medical procedure is not a solution to be considered in isolation: ‘It is one of many tools that can help with weight loss, but by no means is it an easy fix. It is the start of a very long journey to changing your life’. Sue is adamant that people with similar issues arm themselves with all the facts: ‘I had incredibly good medical advice. I made sure of that!’ She laughs, but there is a force behind her words that comes from the bitter experience of not being able to solve vexing medical conditions: ‘For me it was about cutting down the amount of food and making sure exercise became a part of every day. To be successful takes 100 per cent commitment to losing the weight. And it must be done with advice and support from professionals. This is not an easy journey and it’s not one to try alone’.
Sue’s wholehearted commitment to losing the weight safely saw her bodyweight drop from 120 kilograms to 65 kilograms within two years. It was a phenomenal effort by any standard.
Sue now makes sure she walks every day, with time set aside in the diary to do so: ‘I enjoy walking and it suited me. I’m not a gym person and I don’t go to classes. But really, it’s horses for courses. It’s important to work within your ability and build up slowly. You just need to do whatever works, but make sure you do it!’ Since the chemotherapy damaged the nerves in her feet, Sue says that high heels are only an occasional choice: ‘I am usually in good-quality walking shoes’. She also makes sure she has time to include as much incidental exercise as possible, even when she’s really busy with appointments: ‘I take the stairs when I can and try and choose options that force me to use that little bit of extra physical energy’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sue’s natural walking pace is relatively fast and she frequently wears trousers rather than skirts during the day. ‘You do what you can to make daily exercise achievable’, she advises.
The change in her body shape was gradual but transformational, and Sue’s elation is apparent: ‘I have so much energy. The inner happiness and desire to stay well is unbelievable. And exercise has given me a zest for living like I’ve never had before. It made me realise life is so short, so precious. Good health is so important’.
Significant weight loss can also represent shedding issues that may have been carried around for too long. Questions of identity and a sense of rebirth are tied up with the physical change. And, of course, it is a highly visible—in Sue’s case, public—journey. Judi Moylan recalls Sue’s impressive speech to the international gathering of parliamentary members in Vancouver in 2015, especially the power of her personal touch: ‘Susan speaks very personally about her health and there are not many people who have the courage to do that. Her generosity is visceral’.
Anyone who has taken control of their food intake would acknowledge that there can be a lot of resistance to new or responsible behaviours. Sue says it is challenging to face all the social pressure to eat in ways that aren’t healthy. ‘The pressures are all around and food is something we face nearly all the time’, she says. ‘So many of our social occasions revolve around food, and while that is a natural and positive thing, it can be hard at first. It takes time, but I found that I developed ways to not get caught in those pressures or conversations. After a while it’s not an issue.’ Colin noticed the pressure Sue confronted and was an ever-supportive presence: ‘People tend to question it if you don’t eat everything on the plate. Society seems to change its attitude to certain foods every ten years. Weight loss is not an easy journey’.
With the weight at the time of her heart attack now halved, Sue admits: ‘It’s now about maintenance and that’s not easy! I do find that it’s an ongoing challenge, but it’s well worth the effort. I’ve been lucky. I’ve been rewarded with good health and now I have the bonus of being able to wear anything I choose!’ Revelling in the bond with her kidney specialist, Sue says excitedly, ‘I love sending Anna photos of clothes I was wearing. It’s two women sharing the pain of putting on weight and losing the weight’. With a newly enhanced appreciation of shopping, given her slimmer figure and a well-honed eye for style, Sue laughs uproariously at the suggestion that people have noted her penchant for shopping: ‘Yes, I love shopping now’.
Medical treatment successfully defeated Sue’s cancer and repaired her heart, while her dramatic lifestyle shift addressed her obesity. Furthermore, the impact of her diabetes has radically lessened. Referring to her insulin intake, she says with clear relief, ‘I’m like a walking miracle. I was on forty units a day but I’m now on six units. Really, I’m walking around with virtually no diabetes now, but the blood tests show I still have the markers. It was all about management: losing weight, doing exercise’.
For someone who had experienced so much death and was so immersed in medical science, Sue’s sense of mortality was rocked neither by the cancer nor the diabetes. Friends attest to this. ‘She didn’t make a lot of either of those things. It was something that happened to her and she had to deal with it and she did’, explains George Pappas. ‘She had open-heart surgery and we didn’t even know about it. All we knew was that she was in hospital having a procedure. It wasn’t until after the event that people like me found out about it.’ It was only when other organs started to falter that Sue saw the need to take hold of her own health.
In this respect, Sue repeatedly refers to a particular individual: ‘One woman that I’ll be eternally grateful to is Anna, my kidney specialist. I can still hear her words, “You’ll either be on dialysis permanently the way you’re headed, or you’re going to drop dead in six months, if you don’t do something”. I asked her to give me the cold hard facts and she did. I asked her outright if I was going to die, and she said, “Yes”’.