Carla Wilkinson was living what she described as the 'perfect life' after leaving her corporate job to travel the world with her husband. She had recently married and moved into a new home just south of Port Macquarie with her husband and their two dachshunds before stepping away from her demanding role in talent acquisition for a six-month trip of a lifetime.
As things were looking up after returning home, she began experiencing symptoms including fatigue, tiredness, and rashes. Multiple doctors dismissed these as 'stress', and she was repeatedly told she was 'too young' to have cancer. It was not until she was rushed to hospital emergency after waking in the middle of the night with excruciating stomach pains that she was finally diagnosed with a rare type of breast cancer at age 33.
Early Warning Signs Ignored
Just weeks before her shock diagnosis, Carla began enduring relentless exhaustion despite sleeping more than usual after returning from a six-month break abroad. Night sweats soaked through her sheets, painful rashes spread beneath her arms and across her breasts, and unexplained pain radiated through her chest and shoulder area. At the same time, she could not shake the feeling that something inside her body was seriously wrong. Doctors repeatedly reassured her the symptoms were likely linked to stress, hormonal changes, or side effects from coming off the contraceptive pill.
'They kept telling me I was stressed but I didn't feel stressed... I was anxious about what was going on with my body and I didn't know what was happening,' Carla, now 34, told Daily Mail.
A Life in Transition
At the time, Carla's life looked settled and happy. After years spent working intensely, she had finally begun slowing down and thinking seriously about what she wanted her future to look like. The couple had travelled through Japan and Thailand, were planning more overseas trips, and had started having conversations about children.
'We were doing what we wanted to do. I was finally taking some time to focus on myself,' Carla said.
But while her life outwardly appeared calm, she privately felt increasingly unsettled by what was happening physically. The fatigue was unlike anything she had experienced before. 'I got so much sleep and I still felt tired,' she said.
At night, she would wake drenched in sweat. Rashes spread under her arms, across her breasts, and around her nipples. One doctor suggested eczema, and another possibility raised was hormonal imbalance. Her cortisol levels were elevated, which seemed to reinforce the idea that stress was driving her symptoms, even though Carla did not feel mentally overwhelmed in the way doctors described.
'I wondered if I was in perimenopause, but all of it was explained away because of my age,' she said.
Frustration Mounts
Over time, Carla became increasingly frustrated by the disconnect between how she felt and what she was being told. The pain through her chest and upper body also never triggered alarm bells. Looking back now, Carla believes the discomfort was connected to lymph node involvement from the cancer spreading. At the time, though, it was blamed on muscle tension.
'I went for a massage and I was told my pec muscles were really tight,' she recalled.
'I knew I had cancer in my body. I didn't know what kind, but I was convinced I had cancer,' she said.
Ironically, she underwent extensive testing while trying to find answers. Doctors ordered scans of her brain, checked her thyroid, performed pelvic ultrasounds, and investigated a range of possible explanations. 'They were running all sorts of scans - but they never checked my breasts,' Carla said. At 33, she was considered too young for routine mammograms, despite the fact her body was sending increasingly obvious warning signs.
The Turning Point
Then, one month before her diagnosis, Carla woke in the middle of the night in such severe pain that her husband rushed her to the hospital. 'It got to 2am and I was in so much pain I was crying. I couldn't walk - that's how bad it was,' she said.
Lying in emergency, Carla remembered thinking with certainty that doctors were finally going to discover a tumour. 'I remember thinking this is it - they're going to find a tumour,' she said. But even then, her breasts were not properly examined.
Eventually, Carla found the lump herself in her right breast. Around the same time, she noticed the breast had become larger and her nipple had started to invert. Deep down, she already knew what it meant.
'I knew straight away that it was cancer. It was just a gut feeling I couldn't ignore,' she said.
Diagnosis and Treatment
The diagnosis that followed was triple-negative breast cancer - an aggressive form of the disease that is harder to treat because it lacks the receptors targeted by many common breast cancer medications.
'The lump in my breast felt like it appeared overnight. My surgeon said it was a "sneaky" cancer as it hid behind the nipple and wasn't until it got large enough that I noticed it,' she said. 'I also had dense breasts so I had lots of "normal" lumps so it was difficult to tell. The breast appeared slightly larger and the nipple had slightly inverted. My symptoms were all very subtle to be honest yet was already so advanced at diagnosis.'
Initially, scans raised fears the cancer may already have spread throughout her body. Her PET scan 'lit up' in multiple areas, making it difficult for doctors to determine whether they were seeing cancer or an extreme stress response known as brown fat activation. At one point, her oncologist cautiously referred to it as stage three 'for now', while further tests were conducted.
Carla remembers immediately spiralling into fear about what stage four would mean. 'If you're stage four, they don't look for a cure, it's terminal, and they treat you differently,' she said. Eventually, doctors confirmed the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes but remained localised enough for curative treatment to still be possible.
Life Turned Upside Down
Within days of diagnosis, her entire life changed. 'Within a week of getting diagnosed, I lost so many choices, control and freedom and my life as I knew it was literally just blown up,' she said. 'Everything was just taken from me.'
Before cancer, Carla and her husband had been discussing whether they wanted children. Suddenly, that conversation became medical and urgent. Because chemotherapy needed to begin immediately, she did not have time to freeze her eggs before treatment started. 'The choice of whether I could have children was taken from me,' she said.
At the same time, she watched the version of herself she had carefully built begin to disappear. Her husband had recently taken photographs for the career coaching business she hoped to launch, images that suddenly felt like they belonged to another person entirely. 'I lost my long blonde beautiful curly hair,' she said. 'There's no way I would start that business now.'
She began one of the most intensive chemotherapy regimens used for breast cancer patients, undergoing 24 weeks of treatment across six months. The physical effects were brutal - Carla experienced severe fatigue, nausea, hair loss, mouth sores, bleeding gums, brain fog, and neutropenia, which left her immunocompromised and largely confined to home because the risk of infection was so high. She was also medically thrown into menopause while still in her early 30s.
But more than anything, Carla said the cancer dismantled her sense of identity. 'My whole identity changed. Even now, I don't think of myself as the same person anymore,' she said.
Finding Support
One of the most difficult parts of treatment was feeling emotionally disconnected from many of the people around her. Living regionally, most breast cancer patients she encountered were decades older, and while friends and family desperately wanted to help, many simply did not know how.
'At the start all people wanted to do was send me gifts - flowers and spa things - and I'd throw them in the bin,' she said. 'You don't send someone who was just diagnosed with cancer flowers - you send flowers for a funeral.'
Instead, she found real comfort through online communities of younger women who instinctively understood the realities of treatment and recovery. Women she had never met sent practical care packages filled with items she would genuinely need through chemotherapy and surgery: compression garments, headscarves, post-mastectomy pillows, sensitive toothpaste, and puzzle books to help manage the mental fog that came with treatment. 'The generosity and kindness was more than I received from friends and family,' she said.
Remission and Advocacy
In March 2026, after scans showed no evidence of cancer remaining in her body, Carla underwent a double mastectomy and chose to remain flat rather than have reconstruction surgery. She also underwent targeted lymph node dissection in previously cancerous areas. Although she is now in remission, treatment is far from over. Carla is currently undergoing radiation and still faces another six months of immunotherapy infusions every three weeks.
'A lot of people don't understand what having cancer is really like. They think everything goes back to normal after surgery, and that the experience just turns into a distant memory,' she said.
Now, Carla is using her experience to support younger women facing breast cancer diagnoses and to raise money for Breast Cancer Trials through its Big Bold Walk fundraiser. Through its clinical trials research, Breast Cancer Trials is on a mission to find new and better treatments and prevention strategies for every person affected by breast cancer. Carla has already raised more than $3,000 and says advances in breast cancer research likely changed the course of her life.
'If it weren't for past research and advances, particularly in triple negative breast cancer, my outcome could have been very different,' she said.
The Big Bold Walk raises money for breast cancer clinical trials and research into new treatments and prevention strategies. Australians can learn more or register through Breast Cancer Trials.
