When she was told she had stage four breast cancer in 2009, Hallenga didn’t even know it could be a danger at her age. Then she started a campaign to save thousands of lives
Eight months before Kris Hallenga was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer that spread to her spine, she went to her GP about a lump. It was 2009, she was 23 years old and, she says, “actually very miserable”, having just come out of a crummy relationship. Living in Beijing, she was working for a travel company, and teaching on the side, but had come back home to the Midlands to visit her mum and get some teaching qualifications. “The doctor said: ‘It’s hormonal changes, something to do with the pill.’ I was on the mini-pill at the time. ‘Take some evening primrose oil to help with the pain.’” Hallenga wasn’t about to argue: she was due back in China, and the last thing she wanted was to wait around for more tests.
In Beijing, the lump got more painful, and blood started leaking from her breast. She had bouts of feeling unwell, which she couldn’t explain. She came back to the UK, saw a different GP, but was told again that she was probably undergoing hormonal changes and that she didn’t even need to be examined because she had been seen six months before. To this day she is terribly, if ruefully, understanding about what happened. “The chances of a GP seeing a young patient with breast cancer are so slim. What she should have said is: ‘I’m not worried about this right now because if you’re not checking your boobs anyway, you don’t know if this is normal for you.’ I wasn’t touching my boobs at all. I didn’t know anything about them.”
