Just six months after burying her brother, who died from COVID-19, Shelly-Ann McKenzie Morgan received the news that she had been diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer.
She said she had been feeling a lump in her right breast for more than a year and did many tests before it was finally revealed to be cancerous.
“I had a lump which I found the year before and I went to my regular general doctor and he sent me for an ultrasound. I did the ultrasound and they told me it was like fatty tissues. I was a bit concerned because I knew of the whole breast cancer thing so I was a bit concerned. So I went to my gynaecologist who sent me to do a mammogram and the mammogram showed nothing, and so he advised me to wait a year and to redo the mammogram,” she said.
Almost a year later, McKenzie Morgan said she was at home one night laying in bed when she felt something wet under her arm.
“So I’m sitting on the bed and my breast would be hanging down because I didn’t have on a bra or anything and I just looked down on my breast and saw my breast running,” McKenzie Morgan said. She said that a mixture of blood and a yellow fluid was coming from the breast, which sent shockwaves through her body, forcing her to see a doctor and do a biopsy. In February 2022, a test showed that the lump was cancerous. It was the last news she wanted to hear.
“I was saying no way. I wanted to believe that it would not be that because honestly, even when I did the biopsy, I was more looking that it’s non-malignant,” McKenzie Morgan said. The shocked mother of three said she didn’t understand much about what the doctor was saying.
“Reality hit the morning when I woke up. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to go to work. My husband left and my son, and I was just there sitting down thinking about everything and the minute the tears started rolling,” she said.
This news could not have come at a worse time because she had two children attending university and another in high school. She was also studying, doing additional subjects as she could not afford to do them in high school.
Despite battling cancer, McKenzie Morgan went ahead and sat three subjects, passing two. She said that though she didn’t pass with the grades she wanted, she is proud of her accomplishments because she did her best considering her circumstances.
McKenzie Morgan also said that the cancer forced her to experience losing her hair – something she feared greatly and felt deeply insecure about.
“I lost my hair about the third week of the first chemo. I was going to work all the time, nobody knew that I lost my hair, just some of my church family. I would just wear the wig and I mean, that part, I was like tired of it,” she said.
McKenzie Morgan said that it wasn’t until last October, on the same weekend that she left her job of 23 years as a supervisor at a hardware store, that her outlook changed.
“I was on a couples’ retreat. I go every year with my husband, and I met another cancer survivor there. So when I met this lady she said to me ‘don’t wear another wig, not another wig on your head. Embrace it, when you embrace it you will deal with it better’,” McKenzie Morgan said.
She said that after that conversation, she found the strength to go outside without a wig for the first time, and after receiving many positive words of encouragement, she has not worn a wig since.
Now, despite not receiving the official statement from her doctor that she is cancer free, the 45-year-old, who has completed chemotherapy, said she feels good and proudly calls herself a cancer survivor. She said that it was her faith, God, her family, her church and her doctors that made it possible for her to survive this disease.
