‘The best medicine is love''

Karyn was given three weeks to live after her baby was born, but she’s defying the odds and hoping for a bright future

- Phillip Koch

Imagine finding out, on the very same day you give birth to the precious baby daughter you’d given up hope of ever conceiving, that you have cancer. That’s the news brave mum Karyn Love faced on the 7th of May, 2021.

“They gave me a prognosis of three weeks the same day Billi was born,” reveals Karyn, who was told she wouldn’t be alive long enough to even take her daughter home from hospital.

“I had Billi and within hours of getting tested, I found out I had stage-four cancer. At the time, they didn’t know it was breast cancer. They just saw the cancer in the breast, the bone, the liver and behind the eyes.”

INNER STRENGTH

Shocked and terrified, Karyn, 38, started preparing herself to say goodbye to newborn Billi – the baby who doctors said she’d be unlikely to conceive because her egg count was so low.

“I was in the maternity ward and they wanted to transfer me to the oncology ward,” she says, explaining that within a few days of Billi’s birth, doctors confirmed that she had metastatic breast cancer.

“I was getting my will ready, and getting my sister and her husband to nurse Billi so she could get used to them. They had a palliative care team assigned to me.”

It was on the fifth day after Billi’s premature birth that everything changed.