Still smiling: Mayo mother and daughter diagnosed with cancer within months of each other

IT’S one thing to be caring for a child with cancer. It’s quite another to be fighting the health system at the same time. But doing both while having with cancer yourself? It’s unimaginable.
Such were the two years of hell endured by Hollymount woman Margaret Walsh, whose daughter Sinéad was diagnosed with leukaemia at the age of 13. Eight months after the family learned of Sinéad’s cancer, Margaret herself was diagnosed with pleomorphic lobular carcinoma in situ – an extremely rare form of invasive lobular breast cancer (ILC).
Making up 15 percent of all breast cancers, ILC is resistant to chemotherapy and radiation, and it goes undetected in mammograms 89 percent of the time.
After nearly two years of stress and tears, a six-month-long semi-relocation to Dublin, and some dismissive if not outright misogynistic healthcare workers, Sinéad Walsh rang the bell in Temple Street Hospital on September 27 to signal the end of her treatment. Her mother is still undergoing treatment, but well on the road to full recovery.
Moreover, Margaret and Sinéad been the face of the Irish Cancer Society’s Daffodil Day campaign, while her other children have raised over €21,000 for the charity through the ‘Shave or Dye’ challenge.
Margaret, her husband, Brendan, and their kids, Sinéad, Joe and Ciara, can now look back on it and laugh – and they do so quite frequently during their 90-minute-long chat with The Mayo News.
Both Margaret and Sinéad are very lucky, but particularly Margaret.
“Do you know how lucky you are?” her consultant once asked rhetorically. “And I says, ‘I do’,” recalls Margaret. “He says, ‘But do you really know how lucky you are?’, and I says, ‘I do’. Then he turned around to Brendan, ‘Does she really know how lucky she is?’, and Brendan said, ‘She does’. And he said ‘I never get to see women with pleomorphic breast cancer at your stage. By the time I get to see women with it it’s stage 3 if not stage 4. It’s normally too late. Another year, you’d have been a statistic.’”

Fears dismissed
The Walshes’ cancer journey began on May 26, 2022, when Sinéad complained of a sore arm after playing a county semi-final.
“Because she is the youngest of four we didn’t panic too much. I was giving her Calpol and Neurofen for a few days,” Margaret recalls. “She’d had the HPV vaccine, so I thought it was a little abscess in her left arm. On the Monday it was definitely getting worse and she was actually crying with the pain, which wasn’t like her.”
Their GP sent Sinéad to a chaotic Mayo University Hospital at two o’clock one day. She was triaged at five o’clock. By nine o’clock she was ‘roaring with pain’, but their doctor told them to stick to the Calpol and Neurofen.
Not for the last time, Margaret challenged the medic and insisted Sinéad have her bloods taken.
They then went home – only to be called back in the middle of the night. Sinéad was swiftly admitted to a paediatric unit.
Having watched her father-in-law suffer from multiple myeloma, Margaret suspected something sinister brewing her daughter’s haywire blood readings.
“Does she have leukaemia?” Margaret asked the doctor on duty. “He started laughing and looked at me and said ‘Are you a doctor or a nurse?’. ‘No’. He says, ‘Well what would you know about it?’.”
With leukaemia dismissed as ‘old man’s disease’, Sinéad was again sent home and told to have another blood test done in a few days.

Painful diagnosis
Ghost white and still in pain, Sinéad was brought back to the GP in Hollymount by her mum. The doctor again referred her to hospital. The family couldn’t face MUH again, so they were sent to Galway University Hospital, where one staff member accused them of ‘hospital hopping’.
Margaret replied: “If your child was sick you’d be hospital hopping too.”
That stay confirmed the fears first aroused two-and-a-half weeks previously. Margaret’s youngest daughter, Sinéad, had leukaemia.
But the worst was yet to come. Sinéad dyed her pink but then lost it all as soon as she began chemotherapy in Crumlin Children’s Hospital. The treatment triggered diabetes, jaundice, sepsis and a spinal infection that left her in ICU for four nights.
The chemotherapy had to be stopped… but thanks to an experimental drug called blinatumomab, Sinéad soon began to recover.
Her recovery would mean using a wheelchair, having an entire room in her house filled up with medicines and associated paraphernalia, and missing a year of school.
Two years on, Margaret laughs, recalling Sinead’s plea of ‘I want to go to school!’. “I said, ‘You must be the only child in Ireland that wants to go school!’.”
Sinéad’s road to recovery was long and difficult, but not as long or as difficult as it might otherwise have been. The Walshes’ wonderful neighbours looked after the sheep, brought home the turf, and helped however they could – without even being asked.
“I don’t think you had to cook a dinner for months,” says Margaret, glancing across the dining room table at her daughter, Ciara.
“We know who makes the best lasagne in the parish!” smiles Margaret’s husband, Brendan.

Homecoming queens
The first day Sinéad was well enough to come home, the family were a few hundred yards from their house when they noticed a flag-waving blue-and-white gathering outside their driveway. It was her teammates from Hollymount.
“Everyone was crying. We couldn’t believe it,” recalls Margaret, who mentored them from U-10s up to Minors.
Today, Sinéad is a full-time Transition Year student in Ballinrobe Community School, where she sat an excellent Junior Cert, despite missing more than a year of school. She is slowly getting back to football, and she no longer uses the wig in the photo accompanying this article.
Being sick was tough enough for Sinéad without having to see her own mother diagnosed with breast cancer.
“I was very worried,” says Sinéad, her eyes slowly welling up. “Because I had been through cancer myself and I didn’t want her to go through it as well.”
Despite being sick herself, Sinéad remained Margaret’s first priority. So she insisted on a double mastectomy to maximise her chances of survivial.
“I don’t have time for this s**t,” she told a hesitant consultant. “I have a child to get better. Take the two of them’.”
This involved removing all the tissue from her breasts and replacing it with tissue from her abdomen. As Margaret herself explains: “They re-stuffed me like stuffing a chicken.”
After that operation, they discovered a spider-web-shaped 27-millimetre tumour that had been there for God knows long.
The forewarning she received was a white mark she noticed under her breast at the end of 2022. Today, Margaret is an advocate for Lobular Ireland, a network that campaigns for those diagnosed with this rare and hard-to-detect form of cancer.
Around 400 women are diagnosed with lobular breast cancer in Ireland each year. The only reliable way to detect it is to test for dense breast tissue, which 40 percent of women carry and shows up as white on mammograms, just as cancer does. The HSE does not currently fund this test, but – following a 12-year-long campaign – women in the United States are legally entitled to it.
“So it’s a case of 40 percent of us are ticking time bombs,” Margaret explains.
Many people have asked her the same question in the past two years: ‘How do you keep going?’.
She tells The Mayo News about a time when a child psychologist posed this question
“I said, ‘Sure I have to keep going’. ‘You are going to hit the wall now Margaret’, she said. ‘I don’t have time to hit the wall. I’ll hit the wall when she’s better’.
“‘You’re going to need supports’, she said. And I said, ‘We have great friends, we have great family, we have great neighbours… that’s what will keep us going, that’s what will support us when we hit the wall.”
Never a truer statement.

•  For more on lobular cancer and the work of Lobular Ireland, visit www.lobularireland.wordpress.com. If you or someone in your life is concerned about cancer, call the Irish Cancer Society’s free support line on 1800 200 700, 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday.