Inspirational Stories

The Miracle Lady

Lyn Peddie’s doctor called her “the miracle lady”.

For the past 15 years, until she died suddenly on 26 April, the Beachhaven, Auckland, resident had battled ovarian and lung cancer, and a tumour in her bowel. For the last few months of her life she suffered a recurring bladder infection while the cancer spread to her breast and neck.

And she did it largely on her own. Her husband Graham, a Vietnam veteran, died of a heart attack six years ago.

As her illness dug in, Lyn tried to keep active. She drove, walked short distances and the supermarket was still manageable. “I just get a trolley and hang onto it,” she said. A daughter who lives two streets away invited her for a meal every week but she struggled to digest the sort of food she liked.

Food “brasses me off’, she once said. Hospice drew her up a diet sheet but sometimes she’d just love a big box of KFC. Trouble is, it would probably have made her throw up.

Lyn became involved with Hospice in 2005, after a particularly heavy round of chemo “knocked the stuffing out of me” and forced her to quit her job at the Birkenhead RSA where she’d worked for nearly 20 years.

“I tried a few times to go back to work. I was a cleaner but as soon as I put the vacuum cleaner on my back, I vomited. So I had to give it up,” she said. The problem was Taxol – a chemotherapy drug that was not available when Lyn was first diagnosed. Its effects were so severe she said they almost killed her. “As soon as the drug hit my system, I coughed and spluttered. Before that I used to work 40 hours a week. But I’m just an invalid pensioner now,” she said in an interview just before her death. “I just survive and get along.”

Part of this survival was home help three times a week, arranged through North Shore Hospital, and weekly phone checks from Hospice, with the occasional visit “for a wee yarn”. She knew the staff were only a phone call away.

Just before Christmas Lyn spent almost a week as a Hospice in-patient to adjust her pain relief.

“They were unbelievable,” she said. “The meals were absolutely beautiful – the trays of food they’d bring around, the vases with flowers, pretty little cake plates with your morning tea. It was absolutely marvellous and all baked on the premises.”

Lyn said her family was initially worried about her becoming involved with Hospice. “One of my daughters had the idea that you only go into Hospice to die,” she said. “She wanted them to sign a paper [to guarantee that] if I went into Hospice, I would come out!”

Lyn’s battle with cancer began in 1993.

“I was working at the RSA doing some photocopying and I happened to twist and got this sudden pain,” she said. Her boss insisted on taking her immediately to the doctor, who said if she couldn’t get herself to Greenlane Hospital, he’d put her in an ambulance.

After being examined, Lyn was scheduled to have a curette. But the surgeons couldn’t remove her IUD and told her there was “more trouble down there than we expected”.

Multiple tumours were discovered. Because of the web of blood vessels feeding them, an operation wasn’t an option. Nor did radiation help much. It got worse.

During x-rays, the doctors had discovered Lyn had a mark on her lung. So they gave her a hysterectomy and took out her appendix – “everything that was able to come out”, she said. “They were afraid the cancer would spread.”

They had to open her up twice. Soon after the operation Lyn said she began vomiting “stuff that looked like onion soup”. The doctors rushed her into theatre, saying unless they operated within 30 minutes she’d be dead. Inadvertently, the surgeons had put a stitch in her bowel when doing the hysterectomy.

Six weeks later she was back in hospital again, for the cancer to be removed from her lung. “I had two primaries in my body at the same time,” she said. Six months of chemo followed; the lung cancer, it transpired, was very rare. Lyn was one of only 23 people worldwide to develop this particular type.

The ovarian cancer, too, was not the usual sort. Lyn was told it was “borderline” ovarian cancer, meaning it was slow and progressive, rather than the more usual, aggressive type. “The word ‘borderline’ matters,” she said. “If it had been just straight ovarian cancer, I would have been dead way back then with Jackie Onassis.”

Two years ago, doctors had to remove her bowel. “They found it hard to place the [colostomy] bag because of the tumours,” she said. She had been on a bus trip with some friends, playing pool at Waihi Beach and came home “feeling grotty”. Hospice called for a visit and found her abdomen blown up, as if she were pregnant. One of the tumours had grown into her bowel. At one point doctors removed seven pints of fluid from around her middle.

When she died Lyn was still awaiting the results of tests to discover what was wrong with her bladder. “I know you can get a bladder bag but if I need that, I think I’d be almost prepared to call it a day,” she said earlier this year. “Though you can survive with a bladder bag. A lot of handicapped girls have bladder bags.”

Her husband’s death in 2002 was a shock. “The children thought they’d be burying Mum before Dad because I was the sick one,” she said.

Lyn leaves three daughters – Rachel (37), Andrea (35) and Vicki (33) – and three grandchildren (Bradley, Emma and Benjamin).

Most days in the months before her death she headed up to Birkenhead, where Andrea has a babywear, toy and maternity wear shop. Lyn minded the shop while Andrea took a lunch break. It got her out of the house and gave some structure to her day, she said.

But she was slowing down.

“Life at the moment is mostly sleeping and watching TV,´she said in March. “I’m just so tired. I can sleep in a chair all day, then go to bed and sleep through the night.”

On 1 March Lyn was 61. Her sixtieth birthday last year was cancelled at the last minute when she began vomiting just hours before the celebrations were due to begin. Rather than partying and letting her hair down, she spent her birthday in hospital.

This year there were no such hiccups. Her party coincided with the Birkenhead RSA’s annual picnic where, for the past 10 years, Lyn has sold the beer tickets. This year she did it again – and celebrated her birthday a year late.

Sadly Lyn died 26th April 2008