‘Like someone Dropped a bomb on you’
In the space of a few months, Sarah Gandy developed anxiety, lost her job and was diagnosed with cancer. Five years on, she tells Emily Brookes how the dust has settled around the “bomb” thrown into her life.
For a few years, Sarah Gandy thought about cancer constantly. “When I was first diagnosed and going to get treatment, I would think about cancer all the time. It was just in my brain all the time. And then when I finished treatment, it was still in my brain all the time.”
Nowadays, five years after being diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer aged just 36, and nearly four years after completing her chemotherapy, radiotherapy and mastectomy, Gandy sometimes goes a day or two without having cancer on her mind.
But thoughts of her affliction came back in force last week when Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson announced she, too, had breast cancer.
It’s “awful” learning of someone else being diagnosed, Gandy, now 41, says. “Whenever someone is in the news saying they’ve had a cancer diagnosis you feel for them supremely, because you know it can be quite excruciating having to share that news, and I think for Marama having to share it so publicly with that strength is amazing.”
Gandy was in Los Angeles when Davidson made her announcement, and it’s where she is when she speaks to Sunday News.
These days, Gandy is “quite back-andforth” between Auckland and LA. It’s just one of the ways her life has been transformed since October 2018.
Back then, months before she found a lump in her breast, Gandy thought she was at the top of her game.
After attending the New Zealand Broadcasting School she had joined radio station ZM as an intern. Eventually, she’d worked her way up to content director – “the boss of the radio station”.
“Then after I got that I thought, ‘Oh, the other thing I’ve always wanted to do is be a breakfast radio host’. So I went and did that.”
She moved to The Hits, joining Sam Wallace and Toni Street on the popular morning show. It might have been a dream job, but it was also a punishing one.
“It’s an intense job where you are in performance mode from basically 5.30 in the morning. Like you are at 10 (out of 10). It wasn’t a particularly healthy set-up that I had going on for me, so no wonder my body went ‘no, thank you’.”
One morning, she suffered a panic attack before work. That developed into what she would later describe as “a really intense bout of anxiety and depression”.
She took sick leave at the end of the year, and was then informed that her contract would not be renewed in 2019.
In January, she found that lump. It would turn out to be two malignant tumours.
“Honestly when I found out I had cancer, I think I laughed. I just laughed because I was like, of course now this is happening.”
Looking back, Gandy believes the panic attacks and the cancer were linked.
“It was like I didn’t have a piece of the puzzle,” she says. “Once I got diagnosed and started going through treatment I didn’t have another panic attack and I haven’t had one since.”
Partly, she believes, the cancer physically caused the panic attacks: her breast cancer was oestrogen-receptor positive, sending her hormones into chaos. But she also thinks her body was trying to tell her something. “I now totally believe your body tells you things all the time,” Gandy says, “and now I’m paying attention, boy, she’s
got a lot to say. She’s a screamer.”
When she was diagnosed, Gandy was overwhelmed with support. She had her “amazing” husband, film editor Luke Haigh, and a close group of friends who would never hesitate to drop off a meal or take her to an appointment.
“It’s not until after treatment, where everyone goes, ‘You’re good now right? You’re all done’,” Gandy says. “And you’re like yeah, but in reality it’s like someone came along, dropped a bomb on you, and then went – bye.”
Gandy finished treatment in March 2020, the day before New Zealand went into level 4 lockdown. Even if she had wanted to get back into a pre-cancer normal routine, she points out, that wouldn’t have been possible. She was forced to listen to her body, and it was saying: make a change.
So Gandy did something she wouldn’t have imagined even 18 months before, and gave up the career she’d been so ambitious for. Instead, she’s embraced freelancing, picking up gigs as a voice-over artist, MC, podcast producer, and occasional fill-in host, as well as starting her own media training company, Be Good.
“If I had had to leave a job to do this I don’t think I ever would have done it,” Gandy says. “But the universe crow-barring me out of it and then forcing me to see what freelance life is like, it’s the best thing I could have ever done. It’s life-changing.”
As well as giving her time to do things like travel with Haigh to LA when he’s working there, and to rest when her still-medicated body needs it, freelancing has allowed Gandy to become a vocal advocate for breast cancer awareness, including fronting the Change and Check campaign for the Breast Cancer Foundation.
She’s not surprised to find herself in that kind of role. In fact, she’s always had an interest in healthcare, which perhaps dates back to her own mother’s death from cancer – stage 4 bowel – when Gandy was 10.
Before she discovered radio, she thought she might like to be a doctor (“Now I’m like, oh no, too chatty for the surgery”), and as a student at Victoria University, worked as a youth health support person for the Hutt Valley health service, where she helped people “feel comfortable accessing healthcare that might feel embarrassing”.
She says you could say the same for women and breast cancer. “It made me realise that normalising conversations is really crazily powerful, so just talk about it. And massages are great. You know? Just get one!”