THE STRESS OF SURVIVAL
The day after Robyn Kilpatrick finished her successful treatment for breast cancer, she took a bungee jump off Auckland’s Sky Tower to celebrate. A video of the jump captures her shouting “F---you cancer!” on the way down.
It was one week before Christmas 2015. After a partial mastectomy, further surgery to remove lymph nodes, four rounds of chemotherapy over 12 weeks and six weeks of radiotherapy, she was bald, burnt and bone-tired, but she was alive and her prognosis was good. She had every reason to be optimistic about the future.
Butby Christmas Day, her mood was crumbling. She began to worry about returning to work and the possibility her cancer might come back. The support network of friends and family that had cocooned her during her treatment started slipping away – after all, wasn’t she better now?
To distract herself from her emotional unravelling, Kilpatrick, 45, threw herself into voluntary work for the Cancer Society, becoming an area co-ordinator for Daffodil Day, fronting campaigns and even completing a 12km fundraising run. “You just try and block it out. I threw myself into things so I wouldn’t have to deal with the other side of
