Former Queensland premier Anna Bligh scared, but well prepared to fight non-Hodgkin lymphoma Former Queensland premier Anna Bligh says her spirits have been lifted by people's messages. IF 17 years in politics taught former Queensland Premier Anna Bligh anything, it's just how strong she can be when her back is against the wall. The pioneering first popularly elected female premier says that's a powerful thing to have in her emotional armour as she faces her toughest battle yet: the fight to rid her body of the insidious cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma. It was about 7pm on the evening of this year's first State of Origin match, June 5, when her doctor uttered the word cancer as she sat, just the two of them, in his Sydney office. She recalled feeling overcome with "cold terror." "I was very unprepared for a diagnosis like that and very shocked to hear it," she said. The word cancer is a very big, ugly word and when it wraps itself around you, it feels absolutely dark and cold and terrifying. It just, it's a very strange feeling. You just get cold terror all through the bottom of your stomach. But, just as she told Queenslanders devastated by the 2010/11 summer of disasters that she knew "in her bones" they were up to the challenge, she believes she too can face this fight and win. I'm down, but not out. Former Queensland Premier Anna Bligh is taking a cancer knock, but she's getting right back up again. Picture: Jamie Hanson Former Queensland premier Anna Bligh diagnosed with cancer It was in late March, about a year into her political retirement and the beginning of a new life in Sydney, when Ms Bligh first noticed a small lump, about the size of a pea near her right earlobe. The keen runner had booked an appointment with a GP to finally get a niggling foot injury examined and decided to ask about the lump as well. When I first felt it, I wasn't particularly worried. It was more of a curiosity than a concern," Ms Bligh said. I think as women we are very aware that a lump in our breast can be a very life-threatening thing to find. But finding a small lump on my face, you know, when I very first felt it, it wasn't something very much different to a blind pimple and I thought I wonder what that is. The GP ordered X-rays and a specialist appointment. It was five weeks before she made and attended the appointments. Queensland Premier Anna Bligh speaks with Prime Minister Julia Gillard at a media conference on January 12, 2011. Twelve people had been confirmed dead in towns in the Lockyer Valley, with many more reported missing after devastating floods. Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images I'd been busy. I hadn't worried about it. It wasn't something I was paying a lot of attention to. It was only as the day got closer to the X-ray that I could sort of feel it and thought 'this has actually got bigger'. It was the size of a marble. It was a very strange day because I thought I was going in for a relatively quick X-ray and a specialist appointment about my foot. "I ended up staying at the clinic for almost four hours and by the end of that day I had been diagnosed with a tumour in my parotid gland," Ms Bligh said. When I saw the surgeon he said to me 'now please just remember that the word tumour is just the medical term for lump. Premier Anna Bligh visiting flood hit areas in Western Queensland, with Charleville Mayor Mark O'Brien at a levy bank. I think like most people these days, the first thing I did was go to Dr Google and look up what is a parotid gland, parotid gland tumours and all of the information I could find told me that while they're quite common, more than 85 per cent of them are benign. It all seemed to fit that this was probably just a weird growth, nothing to worry about. With no obvious symptoms and armed with the information she had gleaned from her internet research, Ms Bligh said she was confident there was no need for alarm. I went to see the surgeon the following week. He is a head and neck specialist and he said he would see one about once a fortnight and that they were overwhelmingly benign. We did a biopsy and at that stage the test was inconclusive. Premier Anna Bligh and Major General Mick Slater visiting the flood damaged Brassall State School in the Ipswich area where cleanup and repair work continued. 19/1/2011 Pictured with school prinicpal Peter Doyle. Picture: Jeff Camden He scheduled surgery to have the lump removed, which Ms Bligh underwent two days after flying to Brisbane to attend the Health payroll inquiry, in the last week of May. Preliminary tests found some malignancy in the tumour but were inconclusive, however, the final results confirmed the worst. "The pathology subsequently confirmed that it was a tumour in a lymph node that is located in my parotid gland and that I had lymphoma, which is of course a blood cancer, and that was absolutely terrifying because blood is everywhere," she said. For more than a week we didn't know how extensive it was, where else it was, how bad it was. After the initial shock there is a whole medical merry-go-round that you then have to jump on and it takes over your life for a while. Caricature by artist John Tiedemann of Queensland Premier Anna Bligh as captain of the Queensland Flood team. I had a bone marrow test and a PET scan and I am very, very lucky that both of those confirmed that the lymphoma hasn't spread beyond the initial area around my neck, which means that we've caught it very early and it's very, very treatable and the prognosis is good. Ms Bligh said until that moment she had always taken her good health for granted. Now I think of my body as a war zone. I feel like the lymphoma has divisions of panzer tanks in there and the chemotherapy is a thermonuclear device and we've got the bigger weapons and I'm very confident about the outcome. But it's not much fun having a war zone battling away inside you and the thermonuclear devices are good, but they make a bit of a mess of the countryside along the way. Ms Bligh will face her second chemotherapy treatment on Monday but she said the reality of her situation was still sinking in for her, husband Greg Withers and sons Oliver and Joe. Former Premier of Queensland Anna Bligh in Sydney. It feels very real when I'm at chemotherapy and I see a lot of other people who are going through it and are further advanced than I am. But then for two weeks in between treatment it feels a bit surreal, like it isn't really happening. So far I am very lucky that I haven't had a terrible reaction to the treatment, although I accept that as I have more treatments it's likely to affect me more. I haven't lost my hair yet but my doctor tells me I'm very likely to, probably in the next fortnight. So to be fitted for a wig made it feel very real. I think that the other thing I realised I felt is that I still felt very young. My 20-year-old son doesn't think I'm young but I still feel like a very young 52-year-old, so it does confront you with your mortality and it does confront you with all the things you still have left to do. Queensland Premier Anna Bligh with husband Greg Withers after she officially launched the QLD Labor State Election campaign at the Convention Centre in South Brisbane, Queensland. I still have lots of things to do for my kids. Ms Bligh said her prognosis was good, a 94 per cent chance of success according to the International Prognostic Index, and it was when she began chemotherapy two weeks ago that she began to feel in control. For me, starting the therapy felt for the first time I felt like 'okay, now I am killing this bastard. Now I'm on track. Now I know what to do'. She will undergo a series of six chemotherapy treatments over the next three months. "Then I will have a range of tests to see if it's worked and that may hopefully be the end of it," Ms Bligh said. The last thing I want is for this thing to come back so for the next three and a bit months it's taking life very slowly, being very kind to myself. I don't think it will hurt me slow down for a while. Family and friends have rallied around the former premier, along with complete strangers from across the country and around the world. Complete strangers who have sent holy medals, handwritten letters of support and their prayers. While I'm not a particularly religious person, there's something nice about knowing you are in people's prayers. It makes me feel a little safer," she said. It's interesting the effect all of that has on you. I don't think that either Greg or I realised how much we needed a bit of love and support until it all came and wrapped itself around us. It's interesting all the different and funny ways people find to help. I have a Jewish friend in New York who sent another friend in Sydney her mother's recipe for chicken broth. It's a centuries-old Jewish chicken soup recipe and she's been making it for me and bring it over to the house. Other people have made it their business to find me the most ridiculous head coverings on Google and then send them to me. They are different ways of sending love. The effect it's had is that close friends have drawn closer and other people who perhaps we'd lost contact with over the years have reached out and found us again. That's an incredible silver lining. It just reminds me again, one of the things that I loved about politics is that you do touch people's lives and despite all the criticisms and all the bomb-throwing, at its heart, it's a very human business and when you do touch people's lives they don't forget it and they do pay it back and I feel very, very blessed by that. I suspect people don't realise just how powerful it is to send somebody a message, a card, a handwritten letter. When you're spirits are very low, which they can be at times when something like this happens, you can literally feel your spirits being lifted by it. It might sound corny but it's true. I open these letters and I feel better. Ms Bligh recalled one letter from a woman whom she had encountered many years ago at the opening of a Red Cross blood bank. She had needed extensive blood transfusions as she had non-Hodgkin lymphoma. "I'd had a long chat with her because up until that point I'd been very squeamish about blood tests and blood donations and I've never donated blood," Ms Bligh said. She gave such a powerful speech at the opening of the blood bank that I decided I had to get over myself and started donating blood and I became a regular blood donor. She wrote to me and reminded me. They're the little vignettes that stay with you and you realise there's a lot of people out there. It transcends politics, it transcends some of the animosity and negative feelings that politics can sometimes generate and it reminds us all of our common humanity. Ms Bligh described convincing her husband Greg to attend the Sydney Film Festival with a friend rather than attend that June 5 appointment when she was diagnosed with her as one of her biggest mistakes so far, but a lesson worth learning. She thought she was getting her stitches out and did not expect the test results back. Probably it's been one of the harder things for me to accept support, to ask for help and in the early stages when I was still being diagnosed I blithely went off on my own confidently thinking I could do all of this. In some ways being at the doctors without Greg and hearing the diagnosis by myself was probably a good wake-up call to me to confront all that reticence in myself because it would be irresponsible I think for me to try to do this on my own. There are people who don't have a lot of family and friends and this must be very terrifying for them. I feel very blessed with friends, very blessed with family. My mother has seven sisters so every aunty has drawn closer and that's an incredible strength to draw on and I just realise that I would be nuts not to ask friends to help. While I am very confident about the prognosis, it is still a scary and difficult thing to do on your own. Ms Bligh said battling non-Hodgkin lymphoma was far tougher than anything she had faced in politics. There were times when I was exhausted, times when I felt things were unfair, times when I was driven to anger by various things that might have happened, but I can honestly say I never experienced personal fear or felt so completely confronted by the unknown that I didn't know what to do next. That's the frightening thing about cancer. While medicine does know a lot about it, when you're the person experiencing it, it still feels like you are in completely uncharted waters and I never felt like that in politics. I do think that having done some of the things I have done in politics, it certainly strengthened me as a person and I've had to confront thing that taught me a lot about what I can do when my back's against the wall. I was very conscious of learning that when the Queensland floods and disasters were on. That I was being thrown challenges I had never had to face before and as I felt myself rise to those challenges, I learnt things about what I am capable of and that's a very powerful thing to have in your back pocket when something like this hits. But still nothing really prepares you for confronting your own mortality and you think you know what it's going to feel like but you really don't. Ms Bligh said if she had not made that initial doctor's appointment for her foot, she could have still been in the dark about her condition. If I had ignored it for another six or 12 months, it may well have spread quite seriously through my body and become a much, much different and more life-threatening experience. I think there's a message there for all of us that if there's even the tiniest thing worrying you, 25 minutes at the doctor's surgery is worth it. Cancer is a very insidious disease and it is often spreading and there are no symptoms. This little lump was the only symptom I had. I hope that through all of this some people hear more about it and at least think to go and get a check-up.