Debbie and Marie collected for the Breast Cancer Foundation NZ's Pink Ribbon Street Appeal, and urged others to support it too. Photo / Paul Taylor
Debbie and Marie collected for the Breast Cancer Foundation NZ's Pink Ribbon Street Appeal, and urged others to support it too. Photo / Paul Taylor
A pair of Hawke's Bay women who share their workplace have also been sharing in their battles against breast cancer over the past year.
Debbie Unahi-Johnson was first diagnosed with breast cancer in July 2021 and went through a mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiation treatment.
Her colleague of 13 years at Greenmeadows New World, Marie Walker, is on the same journey, getting her diagnosis about a month earlier than Unahi-Johnson.
"It has been good to have feedback from someone else who has been on the same journey as you," Unahi-Johnson said.
"It's really good, because you can talk to your friends and family, but they don't understand the same as what somebody actually going through it does," Walker said.
Unahi-Johnson said she became a Pink Ribbon volunteer for the first time this year to help others in her situation.
She and Marie decided to help the Breast Cancer Foundation NZ's Pink Ribbon Street Appeal on Friday and Saturday.
Debbie Unahi-Johnson (left), with her Greenmeadows New World colleague Marie Walker. Both women were diagnosed with breast cancer last year and now are volunteering to help others. Photo / Paul Taylor
"I was inspired to do it just from the support that they have given me through the journey that I have been on."
She said she kept up with all of her mammograms, but it was frightening to get the news that she had breast cancer.
"When they first told me, I was disappointed. I've already lost my eldest sister to breast cancer."
She said everything moved quickly, and she had a single mastectomy before six months of chemotherapy and 15 treatments of radiation.
"The Breast Cancer Foundation NZ and the Cancer Society are really supportive, and my doctors, the nurses, Villa Six, which is oncology - they're just really amazing," she said.
"I found that my best medications were my mokopuna, my grandchildren; they were better than my medication. I had no hair, but they didn't judge. They just took you, saying, 'You still look youthful', and [were] telling me not to wear a hat because I look fine without it."
