One of the crueller ironies of cancer is that, despite appearing so common in our lives, to suffer it can be one of the most isolating experiences.
For Carla Whiting, cancer - as for so many others - was the disease that was frightening, but always at arm's length; it was the disease that happened to others. Until it wasn't.
When a niggling back pain was confirmed to be pancreatic cancer, and the discussions with her doctors turned to sobering talk of treatments and options and time, she felt the same crushing sense of isolation that can be felt only by experience.
She had sought comfort early in understanding, but to read the bleak statistics of her disease became a dark road she could not endure.
But she felt that, for the constant presence of cancer in media and online, fundraisers and research, there was little that she could find to comfort her about her disease.
She was facing an intense, complex and invasive surgery to combat the diagnosis - a procedure to remove a large section of the affected organs that would take hours on the surgeon's table and months of recovery - and she was feeling lost.
At the weekend, she said - months on from that surgery earlier this year - she was finally coming back to herself. She was among family, friends and hundreds of others who have known her cancer and have walked her long road before.
More than 600 survivors, family members and supporters gathered at Foreshore Park in a sea of purple on Sunday morning, September 20, for a fundraising walk in support of research and treatments for pancreatic cancer and to remember those who had been lost to it.
The Pankind 'Put Your Foot Down' charity walk started as a stroll with a few close friends only a few years earlier with a survivor who had felt as Ms Whiting did when she was diagnosed. A few years on, and hundreds of Novocastrians had joined the cause, raising more than $100,000 for treatment and research and advocating for faster reviews of new medicines and procedures to save lives.
"Pancreatic cancer just doesn't seem to get the time," Ms Whiting said. "I think it affects more people than we realise."
She looked out over the masses of purple as the gathering began the walk towards Honeysuckle.
"But then you realise that a lot of people have gone through this," she said.
"When you go through it, you learn about it fairly quickly. But just hearing about how it has affected other people and their families and you realise that it is quite widespread."
"It is lovely that we can connect with others and in a joyful way - in a positive way - bumping into total strangers and talking about their experiences and your journey. You feel that support."
