Woman Given Terminal Diagnosis Over Mole Living Best Life 30 Years Later

Growing up in the warm sunshine of the Australian eastern coast, life was good for a young mom enjoying a flourishing career in corporate Sydney, but she didn't know that she was about to encounter one of the hardest challenges anyone could be faced with.

At the age of 32 and with a three-year-old girl to raise, Fiona Aaron was told she had a 50/50 chance of surviving two years after being diagnosed with cancer. That was in 1993, and three decades later, she is living her best life traveling the world with her husband.

After spotting a new, itchy mole in the middle of her back, Fiona, upon her husband David's suggestion, went to a doctor in the city, who opted for removal, and after examination of the mole tissue, she learned that it was a grade four melanoma. Thanks to a close friend of hers who happened to be an oncology nurse, she got an appointment at a hospital in Sydney that specializes in melanoma, where she had a wide excision at the site of the mole, a surgical procedure that removes the cancerous cells as well as some of the healthy tissue surrounding them, aimed at preventing recurrence.

"The doctors said you've got more chance of being struck by lightning than it coming back, and of course, lightning struck," she told Newsweek, recalling how this was just the start of her journey, which marked a new beginning in her life.

What Is Melanoma?

According to the American Cancer Society, melanoma is a type of skin cancer that develops when skin cells called melanocytes, which provide pigmentation to the skin and photoprotection from UV rays, start to grow out of control. While it's much less common than other types of skin cancers, it's also more dangerous as it is more likely to spread if not found and treated early.

The most common first sign of melanoma is usually the appearance of a new mole or a change to an existing one, which in most cases will have an irregular shape and/or more than one color. The cancerous mole may also appear larger than usual and may sometimes itch or bleed. While this can happen anywhere in the body, the most commonly affected areas are the back and legs.

First Surgery

After her mole removal, and the doctor's words of reassurance, Fiona went back to enjoying life with her loving family, achieving all of her career goals, but very soon, she found a strange lump under her armpit. The cancer that she thought would never come back had metastasized, and now it was infecting the lymph glands under her arm, so the doctors booked her in for her first surgery.

"When the doctor said you will be in hospital on Monday I just started crying. In the end, they said, I had a 50/50 chance of surviving two years, and I thought okay, well, nothing to worry about, and I went to work," she said sarcastically.

Second Surgery

Two years later, Fiona had started her own business as a producer of corporate video and event management in the city, which she was running smoothly by herself, but her hectic lifestyle was causing her a lot of stress.

"Suddenly I had a very strange feeling. I kept dropping my pen, I couldn't think of what my phone number was when somebody asked, and I thought I'm not feeling too good, I'll just go home. Somehow I got out of the car park and drove home. David was there and I told him I was going to go to bed," she said.

"I remember having this bursting headache, I couldn't even talk. I was just so bad. He drove me straight to the hospital, where they did an MRI and told me I had a bleed in the brain. After that, they put me in an ambulance and took me to a specialist hospital to have another operation.

"There David was told that I would probably not make it off the table or that I'd be a vegetable, so he had to go through hours of thinking what was best, this must have been devastating for him. But I woke up and I was ok, I was lucky."

A brain tumor had settled on a benign tumor that she had, and the doctors were able to just peel it off, before starting her on radiotherapy. But her skin cancer was still lingering.

The Turning Point

"Celebrate if you get to Christmas." These are the words that stuck to David's head, as the doctors explained to him that they had done all they could, but his wife's melanoma wasn't going away, and she would be lucky to survive more than three months.

Upon hearing this, Fiona was devastated, her whole world had come crumbling down, but she couldn't let negative thoughts get the best of her. She said: "I thought well, I've got my own use-by date, but I also thought he didn't say which Christmas, so I just kept going."

After accepting the idea that there was nothing else doctors could do for her, she found a clinic in Melbourne that was running workshops on different ways of dealing with cancer, and this is when everything changed for Fiona and her family.

They told me: "What you're doing at the moment isn't working for you," she said. "So we both quit our jobs, we both had companies that were managing at the time, and moved up from Sydney to the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, which was much more gentle, slower pace of life.

"I did a lot of meditation and visualization, and I thought I've just got to stay positive about this because I've got a wonderful husband who loves me and a beautiful little five-year-old girl who needs her mother. And I just thought really it's love that's gonna get me through this process, and being positive to everybody, and surrounding myself with positive people."

A New Life

Once settled in their new location, the couple became vegetarian, and even grew their own produce. At the same time, Fiona meditated, juiced and led a stress-free life, while their young daughter, Nadia, went to a local country school and blossomed with the laid-back lifestyle.

As soon as Fiona felt better, the couple decided to take time and traveled around Australia for a year in a caravan while home-schooling Nadia on the way.

"We repeated this trip some years later (without Nadia) when she left school and started her first job. We were on the road for two years and had wonderful adventures," David told Newsweek.

While away, the couple began volunteering with Indigenous Community Volunteers and Australian Business Volunteers, a division of the Australian aid organization AusAid, which sent them to work abroad on several projects in the Philippines, Laos and Vanuatu.

"That is how we ended up living in the Philippines, before settling in Portugal," she explained.

Fiona believes that stress played a big part in her terminal diagnosis, so much so that once she removed herself from the pressure and tension that her incessant working hours and city hassles brought to her life, she felt free from cancer.

"It is devastating when you're faced with your own mortality, but you've got to stay positive and say I can do this. You'll have bad days and good days, just be gentle with yourself."

Defying all odds, Fiona managed to get through it, living her life to the fullest, never even thinking about her cancer again.

"I had no idea that I was going to make it this far along the way during the early days of treatment, and when the doctor had said there was nothing else they could do it was devastating but also liberating, because that was when I started rallying on myself and changed my life."

"Her cancer was a catalyst for us in so many ways," said David. "It saved our marriage, brought us closer together, and gave us an excuse to concentrate our energies on initially getting her well then opened us up to a life of adventure keeping in the back of our minds that our time together was precious and we were going make the most of it."

Thirty years later, the couple's adventures continue and they both travel far and wide house and pet-sitting across the globe. They are currently house and pet sitting in Spain, where they're having the most wonderful time.

How Stress Affects Cancer

Although chronic stress can lead to many health problems, it's still not clear whether it is linked to cancer. According to Dr. Karen E. Knudsen, CEO of the American Cancer Society (ACS), there is evidence that stress can influence both cancer development and cancer progression, but more research is needed to be able to prove a direct link.

She said: "ACS currently supports about 50 grants (totaling $40 million) that investigate some aspect of how various forms of 'stress' impact the risk of getting cancer and how it affects various cancer outcomes for those who are diagnosed with cancer throughout their (hopefully long) period of survival."

But while a direct link between stress and cancer is yet to be proved, the indirect link between the two is real and well-known in the medical world.

Hayden Ansinelli, a radiation oncologist at Arizona Oncology's Orange Grove, argues that many people who are highly stressed cope with their stress with one or more habits that are linked to an increased risk of developing cancer.

"Smoking, drinking, overeating/poor diet, and decreasing one's physical activity are all examples of ways that some of us deal with stress," he said. "These are also all unfortunate habits that increase our risk of developing a variety of cancers. In this way, stress can certainly contribute to one's risk of getting cancer."