"It was horrible, but I knew what direction I needed to go in," she says.
Four years after that diagnosis, in 1997, Collins was cleared of breast cancer. Eager to jump back into normal life, she met and fell in love with Craig Collins, and they married in 1999 in a ceremony she organised single-handedly.
Donna Collins' mother, Stella Wall, remembers them running down the middle of a quiet residential street in Epsom, Auckland, laughing, after the reception.
"She'd abandoned her veil by then," says Wall.
"I don't know if she had any shoes on."
Three years passed, taken up with the luxury of ordinary life. Then one Saturday morning, Collins couldn't get out of bed.
It was March 2002, eight-and-a-half years after her original diagnosis. The breast cancer had recurred, cells lodging in her liver. It was covered with tumours, some 4cm-long.
The recurrence amounted to an eventual death sentence: once cancer has metastasised - spread to other parts of the body - there is no cure. Treatment becomes about buying time: balancing the side effects of treatment with the symptoms of the disease to gain the best quality of remaining life.
Collins' doctor told her nothing could be done - it was time to get her affairs in order and call hospice.
Wall drove home with her daughter and husband Craig, sitting in the back seat.
"I cried all the way home with her," says Craig. "It was one of the worst days of my life."
But instead of calling the hospice, Collins went straight to her original oncologist, Dr Vernon Harvey, got started on chemotherapy and within a year she was in full remission.
She was beginning to defy some incredible odds.
Since 1993, Collins has had multiple recurrences of breast cancer. She has managed each one in the same efficient manner with which she approached the first. Instead of gaining the expected 12 to 18 months of life from each successful chemotherapy round, she has gained four years of remission from each successful treatment. According to Harvey, fewer than 1 per cent of patients respond as well to treatment.
In March this year, Collins started her latest round of chemotherapy -her fifth - using newly approved drug TDM 1. It isn't funded in New Zealand, so she sold her house to pay the $150,000 bill.
"I can't take it with me, can I?" she jokes about the money.
We arrange that I will go along to her next chemotherapy session, and I arrive at a private clinic, housed in a brick and stucco building in Epsom the following Wednesday. I step into the chemotherapy room, as jittery as I am grateful. Two women sit chatting, the lilac sails of their chemotherapy bags hanging above them on drip poles. Four other patients are dotted around the room, sitting in black pillowy armchairs or lying on beds.
Donna is nestled into an armchair at the end of the room, a plastic tube snaking up from underneath her blouse. Somebody makes a comment about hair, and suddenly everyone is interested.
"I'm saving $100 every five weeks on getting my roots done," says one patient, a scarf wrapped around her bald head.
"That's what my husband says!" laughs another woman. She is wearing a lush, straw-coloured wig with a sweeping fringe.
The whole room begins swapping stories, comparing tips on how to regrow hair after chemotherapy has finished. A nurse holds up a picture of a woman with a foot-high afro.
"Here's something to aim for," she says. The room erupts in laughter.
A few days later, sitting with Collins on a Saturday afternoon in her well-loved, rambling garden, it is hard to comprehend that she is terminally ill. Her skin glows, she is infectiously chipper.
There is a fairy tale overtone to her story as though she's been exempted, somehow, from the slow folding into death faced by other sufferers of metastasised cancer. Of course, she's as human as the next person, and subject to the same laws of nature. But it's tempting to wonder if something she's doing is influencing the progression of the disease.
Certainly, she has exerted as much control over its march forward as she can, becoming a lay expert in lifestyle factors that may help slow the progression of the disease.
Several lifestyle choices have been proven to reduce the risk of developing breast cancer, and reduce the chance of the disease one day metastasising if it does develop.
In 2006, the Women's Intervention Nutrition Study, the first large-scale randomised trial carried out to study the effect of a low-fat diet on breast cancer, found that eating food low in fat reduces the risk of breast cancer metastasising by 24 per cent.
There is debate about whether this is because of the low-fat nature of the diet, or the weight loss the diet encourages. Whichever factor is influential, a low-fat diet can have a noticeable impact.
Dr Michelle Harvie, research scientist at the Genesis Breast Cancer Prevention Centre, University Hospital South Manchester Trust, confirms weight gain is a major risk factor: a 19kg weight gain doubles the risk of developing the disease.
Maintaining a healthy body weight is especially important for post-menopausal women, according to a report released by the World Cancer Research Fund in 2010. In this age group higher body fat increases the risk of breast cancer because of the higher oestrogen levels created by body fat, says Professor Tim Byers, associate director of cancer prevention and control at the University of Colorado Cancer Centre.
It is a widely held belief that as much as 30 per cent of breast cancer may be because of diet factors. The specifics of the ideal diet are the subject of extensive research and intense debate - a wide range of foods is being researched, among them fat, sugar, meat and soy.
In the absence of consensus, Harvey recommends a diet similar to that patients with cardiac disease are advised to follow, one encouraging a healthy body weight. Limiting alcohol intake, getting regular exercise and breastfeeding have also been proven to reduce the risk.
Collins vigorously adheres to as many of the lifestyle recommendations as she can.
For the past 21 years she has followed a healthy, organic, vegetarian diet, gets regular exercise and she practises meditation and yoga. She refuses to become stressed; her surroundings are tranquil, and she has built a connection with a god undefined by any particular religion. She has surrounded herself with the best specialists she can, and her friends and family help her share the load.
Despite her staunch independence, she has learned to accept offers of help. It's the practical things: a meal delivered, a lift to the hospital, a cup of tea together. She says it helps to be open about her situation.
"You can do that without self-pity," she says. "You can do it in a gracious way."
Now 50, she has made peace with the early menopause caused by her breast cancer treatment, which prevented her and Craig from having children.
She has accepted, too, the constant sickness, the frustrated desire for a normal life - and the prospect of an early death - taking her anger and grief to a counsellor. She says friends don't have the expertise to deal with that level of emotional suffering.
Despite the pain cancer has doled out, Collins regards her disease as only part of her life. Participating in ordinary activities is a badge of normalcy for her.
In 2003, she enrolled in beauty school, fulfilling a lifelong goal.
"I had no hair!" she says, letting out a loud belly laugh. But that didn't stop her from winning the school's student of the year award.
"She's a truly amazing woman,' says Craig. "She's a battler." But Collins insists she's not fighting cancer, she's living with it.
In 2011, her marriage finally disintegrated. Craig says he was exhausted and traumatised from seeing her so sick so many times. At her worst he found it difficult to go out of the house and leave her lying there. And life was frightening.
"You're living by blood tests, trips to the hospital to see how much [the cancer markers] have gone up," Craig says.
But it wasn't those things that broke him. He found it difficult to articulate how the situation was affecting him, and their relationship lost the honesty that had kept them a tight team before.
In 2011, he started therapy. "Get help," he says, to other partners of those dealing with cancer. "Whatever's available, do it. Don't put on a brave face." Though devastated by the marriage break-up, Collins kept battling on. She bought a house, got a job - she works full-time as a financial adviser.
"When I wake up in the morning and see the sun I think, 'Wow!'. I go to work and everyone's moping around, and I'm saying, 'It's great to work!'," she laughs.
Now, three years on from their break-up, she is starting to see more of Craig. Recently they went on a date, a tentative step towards something more solid.
It's exceptional for a patient with metastasised breast cancer to make it as far as Collins has.
The truth is, nobody is completely sure of the reasons why. Harvey suspects the answer may lie in an individual's genetics, and how these interact with the lifestyle choices they make.
And certainly, in this area, cancer treatment is poised for a huge push forward. The advent of genomic technology in the past few years is allowing researchers to begin to analyse the tumour in a more sophisticated way, and the "soil" - the patient in whom the tumour is growing - which is a completely unexplored area.
This could reveal vital information leading to advances in treatment of what has been, until now, a death sentence for so many. The aim is to render cancer a chronic illness.
Harvey doesn't expect to see this within the next 10 years, but he says it's only a matter of time. From now there will be rapid progress in knowledge and, hopefully, treatment.
It's looking highly probable that Collins and other outliers like her, with their death-defying genetics, hold at least part of the key to taming cancer once and for all.
About breast cancer
The most common cancer in women worldwide, it accounts for 25 per cent of all new female cancer, according to the World Cancer Research Fund. In 2012, nearly 1.7 million new cases were diagnosed.
New Zealand's Ministry of Health says approximately 2800 women in this country were diagnosed with breast cancer last year. Numbers are increasing in New Zealand at a rate of around 1 per cent a year, mostly because of our ageing population, says Dr Vernon Harvey, associate professor of medical oncology at the University of Auckland Medical School.
It's a field Harvey has been labouring in a long time. Educated in the Britain in the 1960s, he is now involved in six breast cancer research groups and has received an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his services to medicine.
He is clearly moved by his patients' plight: his upbeat warmth, the jovial gesture of a daily bow-tie and his wife's baking, which he regularly brings to chemotherapy
sessions, all show his regard for the procession of distressed individuals who pass through his office with unfortunate regularity.
He is encouraged by recent improvements in death rates for breast cancer, which have dropped by around 19 per cent in New Zealand since 2000, a figure reflected in Europe and Britain.
The drop, he says, is because of improvements in all areas of treatment, which have combined to reduce deaths from breast cancer so far in such a short time.
"Better screening, better surgery, better detection, better treatment, more hormone treatments, more chemotherapy, all have probably added their 3 or 4 per cent and, together, it's made a big change."
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. For help, or to donate, see www.nzbcf.org.nz.
