‘She isn’t alone’: South Australian women support Ali Clarke following breast cancer diagnosis
Ali Clarke’s devastating on-air health revelation has hit very close to home for thousands of South Australian women, some of whom have rallied to support the radio personality.
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This week, radio personality Ali Clarke bravely revealed her devastating breast cancer diagnosis. And she is not alone.
Melissa Jewell, Sarah Rohrlach, Kaylene Winslade and Angelica-Hazel Toutounji all listened to Clarke recount on air the four words they too have heartbreakingly heard: “you have breast cancer”.
More than 3000 South Australian women were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020, according to the Cancer Council.
Ms Toutounji said she wanted to reach out and give Clarke a big hug.
“I actually sent her a private message on Instagram,” the 34-year-old said.
“Anytime I hear someone is going to get a mammogram even, you lose your breath for a minute because you don’t want anyone else to go through what you’ve gone through.”
Ms Rohrlach, 38, was extremely emotional listening to Clarke on Mix 102.3.
“She isn’t alone and we are all here to help and support her,” she said.
“Sometimes you need other people going through a similar thing to understand the emotions and the roller coaster that you’re on.
“There’s nothing else that can describe those words ‘you have cancer’ – there’s nothing that can prepare you for that, but getting the awareness out there like Ali has done so bravely and so early in her diagnosis, I couldn’t have done that.”
Ms Winslade, 48 was proud Clarke was sharing her story and encouraging people to get checked while Ms Jewell, 42, was moved when Clarke spoke of body image.
Melissa Jewell was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020 when she noticed a large lump periodically appear in her breast.
“It would be there for part of the month, roughly around about when my period was there and then it would go away,” she said.
“I wouldn’t think anything of it.”
A friend eventually felt it and encouraged her to bring it up with a doctor, who ordered a range of tests.
“When the doctor called me I was working in a call centre … and she said to me, you need to come and see me, come today and I can’t I’m at work,” she said.
“She said ‘we need to go through the results … I’ll give them to you now … you have breast cancer’.
“It just knocked the wind out of me.”
Ms Jewell went to her manager’s office to get the rest of the day off to see her doctor.
“She said, ‘I’m going to get you an Uber down there … my daughter died of cancer’,” she said.
Ms Jewell was only 42 when she was diagnosed. She had a two-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter at the time.
She started calling everyone she knew while on the way to the doctor.
“Your brain starts to go into overdrive,” she said.
“You just think, ‘I’m going to die, I’m going to die, I’m going to die’.”
She spent 10 days undergoing a range of tests.
“I felt like I was just holding my breath for 10 days and I couldn’t breathe and all I kept thinking was, am I going to get to see my kids grow up?”
When the tests were complete, doctors were able to develop a treatment plan for Ms Jewell which means she is now, after years of treatment, cancer-free.
For Ms Rohrlach, she never would’ve known she was living with stage-four breast cancer if she hadn’t contracted tonsillitis in December 2019.
“I’m quite an unusual case, I actually don’t have, didn’t have, any tumours in my breast at all, so I wouldn’t have been picked up on a mammogram,” she said.
Tests revealed the cancer, which had already spread to her lymph nodes, had originated from her breast.
She was only 33 when she was diagnosed, with a one-year-old and a 10-month-old.
She had to undergo chemotherapy immediately, something she said was the “hardest thing I’ve ever done”.
“My world fell apart,” she said.
“I’d like to say I was too young, but unfortunately, you’re never too young.”
While treatment has shrunk Ms Rohrlach’s cancer and nothing has since grown, she said she isn’t waiting for “if” it will change but “when”.
“Everyday is scary, everyday I wake up I’m quite hyper vigilant if I have a headache that lasts a little bit too long, I’m afraid that it has spread to my brain – it’s not just an everyday ailment to me,” she said.
Being diagnosed at such a young age and with children reliant on their mum, going through cancer was a “rollercoaster”.
“Having children, they depend on us,” Ms Rohrlach said.
“They need our guidance, I don’t feel like I was very good emotional support for them when I was going through my own turmoil.”
Ms Rohrlach is still undergoing treatment now.
Ms Winslade was 44 when she began to feel more fatigued than usual in 2021.
She visited a GP who wanted to prescribe her antidepressants.
“I didn’t accept that answer so I went to a different GP,” the now 48-year-old said.
That GP thought she was perimenopausal and conducted more blood tests before again feeling as though antidepressants may be the best course of action.
“With that I actually said to her, ‘while I’m here I have this small lump in my breast, it might be worth getting that checked’,” she said.
She was referred for a mammogram, underwent an ultrasound, then biopsy and then a few days later was called back into her doctor’s office.
“She said ‘I’m really sorry to tell you that you have breast cancer’,” she said.
“I wasn’t even thinking of the lump at the time, it was more just feeling a bit tired and fatigued.”
Ms Winslade was diagnosed with grade-three, stage-two invasive ductal carcinoma triple positive breast cancer.
Ms Winslade’s husband Simon has battled cancer twice before, so after uttering a swear word, she was ready to take action.
“I said, ‘yep, no worries, where do we go from here?’,” she said.
She was diagnosed on March 25, 2021 and she rang the bell signifying the final round of her treatment on October 13, 2022.
She has been cancer-free since.
When Ms Toutounji’s nipple took a significant time to recover after her young daughter bit it while breastfeeding, she decided to visit her doctor.
“I was doing everything to support healing but my nipple did not heal and I went and got an ultrasound,” she said,
The sonographer told her she was completely fine and it wasn’t cancer.
She left it for months, placing a Band-Aid over her breast until a doctor at her new place of employment, where she worked as a women’s health and fertility nutritionist, took a look and told her she might have nipple cancer.
Ms Toutounji went for a range of tests and appointments, including a biopsy, and on March 30 last year she was given the news that she had breast cancer.
“I got the phone call and then it was like, ‘you need to go for an MRI straight away’,” she said.
“You’re in this tiny, little claustrophobic box for 20 minutes and I remember thinking, ‘oh my God, I haven’t told my husband, am I going to die?’.”
Following the tests, Ms Toutounji was told she had stage three HER2 positive cancer.
“I wanted to crawl up into a ball,” she said. “It was probably the worst day that I’ve ever experienced.”
Ms Toutounji began her treatment and had a positive response to it, showing no signs of cancer for now.
“I’m a mum, I’ve got two daughters,” she said.
“For me, the way I kind of went into everything that I was experiencing was that, you could take away all of my limbs, you could take away my hair, if I can watch my daughters grow, that’s what I care about.
“That’s how I handled it and that’s how I got through it.”
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Originally published as ‘She isn’t alone’: South Australian women support Ali Clarke following breast cancer diagnosis
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