Sally Obermeder: ‘This is the day I never thought I’d see’

In an emotional interview, television personality Sally Obermeder looks back on the decade since her breast cancer diagnosis.

It’s almost 10 years since Sally Obermeder gave birth to her daughter Annabelle, but even now the awful ricochet of emotions is never far from the surface.

There was joy that, at 38 and after years of infertility, she had finally become a mother, but that will forever be tempered by the fear that sliced through her happiness as she cradled her newborn baby.

Just a day before she’d gone into labour, the television host learnt she had stage 3 cancer. The tumour in her right breast was the size of a tennis ball. When she’d asked if she was going to die, it was the silence that conveyed the gravity of her predicament.

“My greatest fear,” she says quietly, tears falling, “was that I would go and she would never know how much I loved her.”

Birth and death aren’t supposed to intersect. Obermeder calls it “irony” but you have to wonder if it’s actually brutality that finally gifts a woman a daughter through IVF, only for her to learn that she may not be there to watch her grow up. She says she considered writing letters to her baby girl, but would that mean she’d accepted her fate? What if she didn’t survive and hadn’t told her all the things she wanted to say?

“I remember the look on the doctor’s face – and I just fell apart.” (Picture: Robbie Fimmano)

A decade on, as she prepares to celebrate Annabelle’s 10th birthday on October 15, Obermeder will be quietly saluting so much more: her recovery after a double mastectomy and 16 rounds of chemotherapy; 20 years of marriage to her husband Marcus, who has been by her side through it all; and their second daughter, Elyssa, born via surrogate from the very last embryo the couple had left.

“This is the day I never thought I’d see and here I am,” she tells Stellar in an exclusive interview to mark the anniversary of her diagnosis.

“I remember thinking that if I could live to see Annabelle turn 10 that would be beyond my wildest dreams. It’s not lost on me that this is a huge milestone. It’s incredibly significant.”

Obermeder, 48, never shies away from sharing her story. She replies to everyone who contacts her upon learning that they or a close friend or relative has been diagnosed with breast cancer. Doing so, she says, is a form of honouring her own journey and all those who invested in her achieving a happy outcome. She’s also had therapy to process the tumult of feelings. But ask her to recall the moment she learnt she had cancer, and it still haunts her.

At 41 weeks pregnant, she had a routine appointment with her obstetrician. As she says, she’d had such a happy pregnancy and was so excited to become a mother that she only mentioned the lump in her breast in passing.

She’d presumed it was a blocked milk duct and was half way out the door when she breezily told her doctor that next time she came she’d get him to check it out. He insisted she show him and ordered a mammogram for the next morning.

“The worst thing that could happen has happened. It’s made me tougher but also softer.” (Picture: Robbie Fimmano)

She went into the clinic at 9am and was still there at 4pm after two mammograms and two biopsies. She’s not sure whether it was the infusion of pregnancy hormones or her naturally sunny personality, but she recalls not being worried. Even when the nurse told her they’d rung Marcus to come in, she says the penny still hadn’t dropped.

“It was only when we were sitting down looking at the doctor and she started to say, ‘I’m really sorry…’ That’s when it was sickening because you know anything after that’s going to be bad,” she says now.

“She told me I had cancer and that it was aggressive and advanced, and that I was going to have to have the baby immediately and then start treatment.”

Obermeder describes it as an out-of-body experience. She had no family history of breast cancer and thought she was too young.

“It was like an alien falling out of the sky and landing at your breakfast table,” she says, recalling how she held her belly and asked if she was going to die.

“I remember the look on the doctor’s face and I just fell apart because it’s almost in what people don’t say that the answers lie.”

That was October 13. She was induced the next day and told she would have to deliver the baby naturally. There would be no time to recover from a caesarean; she needed to start chemotherapy immediately.

After a 36-hour labour, her longed-for baby was born. Annabelle weighed 3kg and had no hair. Obermeder remembers looking into her big, brown, soulful eyes: “When she was put on my chest I was sobbing because for a minute I forgot. I told her I loved her so much. And then, like with all kinds of nightmares, you remember. It was sickening. Life and death in the same window. I kept thinking these things shouldn’t exist together.”

As the new mums in other rooms celebrated with their families, Obermeder went straight into tests and scans. She couldn’t breastfeed through chemotherapy so was given tablets to make her milk dry up. “It wasn’t the experience you fantasise about when you get pregnant,” she recalls.

“You think about feeding or walking in the park with a pram, and it’s not any of those things.”

(Picture: Robbie Fimmano)

Obermeder’s rare form of triple-negative cancer would only respond to an older-style, more aggressive treatment. Within 10 days of giving birth, she was spending all day in hospital, being what she calls “nuclear bombed”.

Her nails fell off, her mouth and throat ulcerated, she lost her hair and eyebrows, and her bones ached constantly. She was so sick she could only endure one mastectomy at a time. Worse, she couldn’t cuddle or kiss her baby because the treatment was too toxic for a newborn. What was supposed to be three months of chemotherapy turned into nine.

As she says: “I was told I could stop but, whatever happened, I wanted to know that I’d done everything I could. I never wanted to have regrets.”

Even as she recovered, the former Today Tonight reporter was reminded she wasn’t out of the woods. Doctors were concerned that if her cancer returned, her body might reject any implants, so instead part of her lower abdomen was used to rebuild her breasts. She ticked off one year, then two, then three, taking a role as host on Seven’s new afternoon show, The Daily Edition.

She also drew on her earlier career in finance to set up a wellness business called SWIISH (an acronym of “stylish women inspiring inner strength, health and happiness”) with her sister Maha Corbett, who’s a health coach, and the siblings went on to release their hugely successful ebook Super Green Smoothies after discovering the concoctions aided Obermeder’s return to health.

While she and Marcus wanted another child, her obstetrician feared that another pregnancy could trigger a return of the cancer. Instead, the couple found a surrogate in the US and shipped over their four remaining embryos. The first attempt led to pregnancy but their surrogate, Rachel, miscarried at 12 weeks. The second and third embryos didn’t take.

But much to their delight, the fourth and final one stuck, and their daughter Elyssa was born in December 2016. While Annabelle is her mum’s mini-me, the blue-eyed, curly haired Elyssa, now 4, is all her dad.

Sally Obermeder with her daughters, Annabelle and Elyssa, last month. (Picture: Supplied)

Both girls know their birth stories. As Obermeder points out, she’d never heard the word cancer at the age of 10.

“They both know that I was sick and we’ve told Elyssa that Mummy couldn’t put her in her tummy so we had to ask Rachel to carry her in her tummy. Obviously they don’t know the seriousness and sadness of what’s happened but I suspect that’s something that will come up as they get older.”

While the family had planned to celebrate Annabelle’s birthday, 10 years of being cancer-free and the couple’s wedding anniversary with a day out on a boat on Sydney Harbour, they’ll wait until lockdown is over.

A decade on and with her 50th birthday just a few years away, Obermeder says it’s not just cancer, but also age and motherhood that have changed her.

“I’m acutely aware of time, and in a way that has made me braver because I’m like, well, there’s nothing to lose. The worst thing that could happen has happened. It’s made me tougher but also softer. I want to nurture and love deeply the people I care about because none of us know how long we have.”

While she credits her parents, Sarah and Mustafa, and sister with helping get her through, she says she’s reflected a lot on her marriage of late. “Marcus has been absolutely unwavering in his love, support and devotion,” she says.

“I often [tell myself], ‘I feel so fortunate that I tried to crack onto you at that party’, because he’s loved me so deeply and so fiercely through some of the toughest, trickiest and darkest of times. When someone gets cancer, everyone in the family is impacted.”

Sally Obermeder stars on the cover of this Sunday’s Stellar.

A decade on, she no longer needs regular PET scans but there’s no question her illness has left a legacy. It’s evident in the attitude she adopted in response to losing her job at

the Seven Network last year.

As she says, “I’m so grateful because I had more experiences than a little girl who grew up in Castle Hill could have ever dreamed of. I’ve met every celebrity under the sun and I’ve hosted my own show. I left feeling like I’d been at the buffet and tasted everything.”

There’s a similar contentment in her commitment to being present for her family and in the loyalty to the online community she’s built up through her business. SWIISH makes products to support health, sleep and immunity because, as she tells Stellar, she knows what it’s like to have a body that doesn’t function. The business is expanding into more supplements and skin care.

When talk turns to that milestone birthday, she says she can’t wait. “I’d love to get to 90. I just want to make sure I’m as strong as I can be and as good as I can be. I’ve learnt to feed my brain in the same way I feed my body, and that sometimes means stepping away from negative talk.”

As for cancer, it’s a subject she embraces rather than fears. “I don’t shy away from thinking about it, but the rawness of those moments with Annabelle will always stay with me and it’s certainly shaped my early time with Elyssa as well.”

More than anything it’s taught her that so much is outside her control. “It still frames how I live, how I see the world and the decisions I make, but part of healing is not getting hung up about what might happen. I have many skills but knowing what the universe has in store for me isn’t one of them.”