An Auckland woman who is now in remission from breast cancer has shared her “miraculous” story after initially being given just five months to live.
In May 2022, 72-year-old Christine Davies said it was “an absolute shock” to be told her Triple Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC), first identified and treated in 2020, had returned with a vengeance.
“Because I went through all the breast cancer stuff in 2020, and all through Covid, that whole year was horrendous. You think you’ve got past it, you think that you’re going to be OK, and then suddenly again you find you’re not,” she told 1News.
Then in July that year, the grandmother from Northcote on Auckland’s North Shore sat beside her husband Jeff as she was told she had stage four, metastasised breast cancer and only five months left to live.
“You try not to think about it, in a way, but obviously it’s in the back of your mind. But I just couldn’t conceive the idea that I was going to die, and I wasn’t going to accept the fact that I was going to die.”
Christine Davies, 72, said she was in “complete shock” after being told she only had five months to live in 2022. (Source: 1News)
As a semi-retired professor at the University of Auckland, Davies took a pragmatic approach to her diagnosis and threw herself into researching various treatment methods.
Previously she had reacted badly to chemotherapy, but a test of her cells showed that she was a strong applicant for an immunotherapy drug called Keytruda, which at the time was only publicly funded for treating melanoma, but was also being trialled for TNBC.
As the Keytruda trial using humans had not yet concluded, Davies said the doctor in charge of her care at the time would not support the treatment.
Davies said her daughter was instrumental in linking her up with medical oncologist Dr Catherine Han, who specialised in gastrointestinal, breast and brain cancers.
She was prescribed Keytruda, which cost her around $100,000 for the first nine treatments and $1500 per treatment thereafter – totalling around $150,000 through the private sector.
Friends urged Davies to create a GiveAlittle page to help pay for the drug, but initially she was “very reluctant” to ask strangers for help.
“I guess I was brought up that you don’t accept charity, and I wasn’t going to. I mean we were going to try to manage to pay,” she laughed. “In the end I thought well it’s not how I wanted to spend my superannuation so I did do it.”
She said the donations began to pour in from students, colleagues, friends, and even people she didn’t know, showing “the positivity of New Zealanders”.
“There’s still such wonderful compassion, spirit and love in New Zealand. We need those stories of care and love in our society.”
She says the treatment began to work almost immediately, and within three months the cancer had all but “disappeared”.
“I know it doesn’t work for everyone, but for me it was like a miracle. I had four tumours in the plural cavity of my lung, I had a whole whānau [of tumours] living in my lymph nodes. But it was just so miraculous they all disappeared within three months, they were all gone.”
“Catherine told me that I was actually the first in her clinic to have Keytruda for TNBC, because there was nothing for Triple Negative before. It was a death sentence then.”
Pharmac later announced that, from October 2024, Keytruda would be funded for eligible people with advanced triple-negative breast cancer, head and neck cancer, colorectal cancer, bladder cancer and Hodgkin lymphoma.
Director of pharmaceuticals Geraldine MacGibbon said at the time that access to these medicines would “slow down the progression of these cancers and improve survival so that people have more valuable time with their whānau and friends”.
Which was exactly what it did for Davies.
In remission
Now, speaking from the sunny shores of Granada in Spain, Davies says she received an email from Dr Han on August 9 to let her know she was officially in remission.
“Really happy to tell you that the Signatera test detected no ctDNA (i.e clear)!!” Han wrote.
“With this result and the recent clear CT scan, I’d be happy to support discontinuing pembrolizumab (Keytruda).”
The once-frugal Davies says she now enjoys drawing from her “living life” bank account a little more often.
“It’s my way of actually enjoying life, realising how significant and how important life is. You only get one shot at it and you might as well enjoy as much of it as you can.”
