A 32-year-old mother with incurable cancer wants to help others battling the disease

After battling two cancers, the last of which was diagnosed on her wedding day, a mother from Chicoutimi wants to devote time in the months she has left to helping other people suffering from this disease.

Aged 32, Claudia Gagnon, mother of two little girls aged three and four and stepmother of a 13-year-old boy, is battling brain cancer.

This one, however, is merciless, incurable.

It was on her wedding day, August 10, that everything changed.

As she prepared to put on her white dress, she began to suffer from severe headaches.

“It really wasn’t going well, but I managed to get to the altar to get married,” recalls the young woman, with a smile in her voice.

But minutes after getting the ring on her finger, she had to be taken by ambulance to hospital, missing her wedding night.

It was then that a 2.5 cm mass was detected in his brain.

“It was a disaster for everyone […] especially since we had decided to get married to celebrate life, for remission and to move on,” says the woman who is a professional nurse.

Successfully operated on on the brain on August 19, Claudia was unfortunately not done with the cancer, which had time to lodge in her cerebrospinal fluid.

It must therefore undergo significant daily “drainage”.

“She’s in a lot of pain.”

“It puts a lot of pressure on her brain and makes her suffer a lot,” says her husband, Mathieu Lavoie, at her bedside at the Chicoutimi Hospital, where she has been since the beginning of September.

In addition to causing nausea, the cancer also sometimes robs her of her speech and vision.

“All she wants is to regain her sight, to be able to see her daughters,” said the 35-year-old father, before bursting into tears.

Although her state of health is “very fragile”, the young fighter decided to begin, on Wednesday, another round of chemotherapy treatments, this time “palliative”, to “try to buy her months”, says Mr. Lavoie.

The second time

It must be said that she already knew cancer, having fought it, not without difficulty, three years earlier.

In November 2021, when she was 36 weeks pregnant, she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer in her left breast, in addition to bone metastases.

The young woman had to give birth quickly a few days later, to be able to begin six months of “intense” chemotherapy.

“I was told I had less than an 18% chance of survival. But, I didn’t care, I didn’t need 18 chances, I just needed one […] I had no choice, I couldn’t leave my family,” she recounts with emotion.

“The happiest moments of my life”

“I find that it makes no sense what is happening to me, in the happiest events of my life. I want something bigger than me to come out of it,” she says.

She wants to launch an online video, allowing women to do their own breast self-examination. “I find that we are not informed enough, we do not talk about it enough,” she says.

The video, filmed by clinical nurses from Chicoutimi Hospital, should be launched in the coming weeks.

Decorative ornaments for Christmas trees, called “support balls,” created by Claudia will also soon be on sale in businesses in Chicoutimi. The funds will be donated to the Cancer Saguenay organization.