Five years ago, Lindie Liebenberg heard the most life-altering four word sentence a doctor can put together, ‘you have breast cancer’.
Read more: One woman’s triumph over breast cancer
She will never forget that fateful February day, when, after many tests and scans, the biopsy would come back positive for cancer. “I asked my husband, Werner, did I just hear right, do I have cancer?”
Liebenberg had always taken good care of herself. She ate healthy, exercised, and maintained her weight. Never smoked, kept her gynae appointments, and had mammograms done frequently since she was 40 years old. To her, these were not the makings of a cancer candidate, right?
In less than two weeks of learning she had cancer, the Northcliff resident met with her oncologist, a pleasant and caring doctor who, to her, has the worst job of giving people bad news more often than not. In her case the diagnosis was stage three metastasized breast cancer. Her and Werner sat dumbstruck at the gravity of the situation.
The last born of seven children, Liebenberg was no stranger to great loss. Her parents passed away three years apart while in their 60s, and she has dealt with the death of five of her siblings, either due to heart and lung-related illnesses, diabetes, surgeries, or accidents. Her beautiful, 34 year, marriage to Werner has been blessed with three wonderful children, as well as four grandchildren, who she says always fill her love buckets with energy. At home, following her diagnosis, it was her loving husband’s arms that enveloped her as she cried in the kitchen. “He always let me be, and said I must cry as much as I need to, because I have reason to. He made me feel good, said I looked good, and went with me to each scan, test, and chemo session.”
In March 2019, she started her six months of chemo, which included four of the worst chemo, Doxorubicin, also known as ‘red devil’, both because of its distinctive colour and because of the serious side effects it may cause. This was her first shock, her second shock came through losing her hair. On one emotional day, she, her two daughters, and daughter-in-law went to cut it all off. The girls each donated some of their own hair, which was put together to make a wig for her.
After six months of chemo, she had a bilateral breast and nipple saving mastectomy with direct reconstruction silicone implants, followed by 29 radiation sessions. At the end of her first year, she was clean and in remission, but her journey wasn’t over.
A routine follow-up exam in 2020 would find fast growing cancerous lymph nodes in her auxiliary armpit. She got surgery for this, but it was not enough, and the side-effects from the chemo were physically overwhelming to say the least. In 2021, her third year of cancer, they found a cancerous liver lesion, the size of a coin. Doctors opted not to operate on the liver at that time, since she’d been through so much already. They chose a very delicate liver radiofrequency ablation procedure instead. A month later, another scan was done and it showed two lymph nodes, deep in her abdomen, next to her liver, had tripled in size.
“I never believed in depression, but when I heard that the cancer had spread for the fourth time, I was so emotional that I just lay in bed for four days. I did not want to get up, talk to anyone, do anything. I just felt like crying,” she said. Though she would eventually get out of her depression, the beginning of 2022 was no picnic. She got Covid-19 which meant chemo had to be postponed, a dog bit nine deep holes in her hand, and she was hospitalised for six days for salmonella poisoning.
In January 2024 she drove back to the hospital, an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. The feeling was confirmed when the doctor told her the cancer was back for the fifth time, this time in four lymph nodes. Two weeks later she had laparotomy surgery. They found this cancer was more aggressive and still from part of her breast cancer.
Now, Liebenberg is stage four and nothing about it is easy. On September 9, a day before her 54th birthday, she had her last chemo, her 54th to be exact. “When you are in remission people assume you’re fine, but you’re not.” She aims to stay positive and count her many blessings. If she teaches her children anything its to never give up. “I have been through the mill and walked the road, and I am still standing. I hope to be for many more years.”
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