Holly Byrnes: Roxy Jacenko was my secret breast cancer battle life coach

Haters are gonna hate I Am … Roxy, the sassy new reality series starring Roxy Jacenko, but for Holly Byrnes, the outspoken power publicist also coached her through the hardest battle of her life: beating breast cancer.

She’s the publicist they can’t keep down, and now with her own reality TV show to shout her successes from the rooftops.

But for all the haters who will no doubt come for Roxy Jacenko after the debut of I Am … Roxy during Ten’s pilot week, I won’t be one of them.

Not because I’ve known her for more than a decade, working with the power player over that time and watching as she went from the personal assistant to one of my late, great mentors, fashion designer Mark Keighery, to become by far the best lifestyle publicist in Sydney.

You needed five skirts, two blue belts and a tap-dancing donkey for a shoot in one hour?

Roxy would have all three boxed, with a bow, on your desk in 15 minutes, half-er if she was having a bad day.

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Watching the tide of anger and jealousy flow against her over the years was frustrating for someone who knew those criticising her were only doing so because they didn’t have the smarts or the chutzpah to do half of what she got off her arse and did to make it.

And also not because I love me some car crash reality TV, the kind that makes you want to throw things at the telly; or giggle at the silliness of it all.

Red hot … publicist and reality TV star, Roxy Jacenko has no time for haters. Picture: Instagram.com/roxyjacenko

I’m more a Kardashian fan than a Married At First Sight maniac, mind you, so watching Roxy send her two kids, Pixie and Hunter off to school with skim mocha coffees was the kind of harmless fun my brain can handle most hump days.

But on a more serious note, I stand here as a card-carrying member of Team Roxy for the real woman she is and the secret role she’s played in coaching me through the hardest battle of my life: beating breast cancer.

Roxy’s fight with the disease was sadly a very public one, with her diagnosis coming just one week after her husband, Oliver Curtis, was jailed for insider trading.

My C-day came on February 4 this year — International Cancer Day, as luck would have it.

And one of the first people I reached out to for advice and counsel was Roxy, who I know would spare me the pity party and bullsh*t.

At that point, I had not told my family I was sick, scared to send them spiralling down the same path we’d just been on with my eldest sister, Tracey, who had lost her battle a bit over a year before.

I was afraid, of course I was, but Roxy got me three doctors referrals in 30 seconds. No joke.

Her first message set me straight: “Oh Hol — don’t worry, it will be fine — look at me,” she said, from the back of a chauffeur-driven car, after getting off a plane, Roxy-style.

Roxy Jacenko has become an advocate for breast cancer support and awareness, recently dying her hair pink for Breast Cancer Awareness month. Picture: Justin Lloyd

The words of my GP were a foreign language to me at that time — invasive ductal carcinoma — so I asked her to translate and compare it to her own.

“Truth is,” she wrote to me, “I don’t know. I didn’t listen to what I had, I just told them to tell me what I had to do. My mum dealt with it because I couldn’t think straight … too much had happened the week prior, with Oli going to jail.”

If you want a snapshot of the woman she is and what she’s made of, that sentence sums up her resilience and tenacity right there.

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And the next message: “You will be okay, I promise I will help you” shows her heart.

Over the confusing and emotional days and weeks ahead, Roxy was my life coach, texting me what I thought at the time were crazy mantras about how I would “begin to like” treatment.

A few weeks into my radiation, strangely emboldened by the journey I was on and shocked by the strength I had found in myself, I knew Roxy was dead right.

The morning of a secondary biopsy which I feared might show my cancer had spread, it was Roxy who got in first with her messages of encouragement and truth bombs … at 7.26am, no less.

Roxy Jacenko working from her hospital bed as she went into labour with her first child, Pixie. Picture: Supplied: Roxy Jacenko

Business as usual … the writer after surgery 'doing a Roxy'. Picture: Jane Negline

When I said I was “powered up and ready to roll” her response was exactly what I needed, and many women do: “Good that’s the way. You got to be like that. Business as usual.”

“You can’t afford to get emotional or consumed by it. You just keep busy, routine with added doctors’ appointments and I promise you will look back in two years with me when you are taking Tamoxifen with me and we will be complaining we are f*cking schvitzing and laughing going … ‘only us’ (Tamoxifen makes you really hot lol).”

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The biopsy was negative and my lumpectomy for a 7mm tumour scheduled, with Coach Roxy front and centre — sending flowers, messages of support and just cheering me on.

Famous for getting back to work within an hour of giving birth, I had Roxy in mind when I got back to my hospital room after my operation, pulled the laptop out and had some deadlines to meet.

When my best friend Jane walked in to visit, she laughed and exclaimed: “Oh hey Roxy, what are you like?”

Sending her a snapshot, propped up in bed, she replied: “Yea, so proud of you. That’s it, life as normal.”

Well, as normal as our lives are ever going to be, Rox.

Holly Byrnes is News Corp’s National TV editor.

@byrnesh

Originally published as Holly Byrnes: Roxy Jacenko was my secret breast cancer battle life coach