Cassie Perrins remembers the moment her life changed forever. It was 2020, and with two young girls, aged 11 and nine at the time, the Queensland mum noticed some niggling pain on the left side of her body. What followed was years of specialist appointments, surgeries and chemotherapy — only for her oncologist to tell Cassie she was out of options.
Know the news with the 7NEWS app: Download today She was dying. “I don’t run on time limits,” Cassie, now 48, tells 7Life of her devastating prognosis. “I live every day as it comes and I know, now, it’s about the quality of time with my kids not the quantity.
” In 2019, Cassie, from Gladstone, 500km north of Brisbane, went in for routine breast cancer screening . The results came back clear and she continued life as normal. But in September the following year, her husband Lenny noticed a lump under her armpit.
A rush of doctors’ appointments followed, with a biopsy ordered immediately after her mammogram results were returned. Devastatingly, the lump — which had been missed in her previous scan just the year before — was cancerous. Diagnosed with stage three triple negative breast cancer, Cassie braced herself to tell daughters Anna and Jessinta.
“We don’t sugar coat anything,” Cassie says. “It was of course a big shock. We were all very upset.
” With her next appointment a week away, the mum was in the dark about what her diagnosis actually meant. She slipped into a world of ‘what ifs’ and could no.
