When Jayne Brown was diagnosed with two brain tumours and told they were inoperable, she was devastated.
One tumour stretched across both hemispheres of her brain and the other was pushing her right eye out of its socket. Doctors said if they operated, she would lose her legs and her speech, but Ms Brown wouldn’t take no for an answer.
The 60-year-old Mooloolah Valley mother of three and grandmother of seven had too much to live for and wouldn’t go down without a fight.
She contacted Professor Charlie Teo, the neurosurgeon famed for treating patients other surgeons won’t touch and on August 10 last year, in the midst of COVID lockdowns, she had the surgery that has given her a new lease on life and a desire to give back to the Charlie Teo Foundation.
“My eye was actually popping out,” she says. “I was a walking timebomb. I sent Charlie all my scans, he gave me a Zoom appointment and said ‘I need you here as soon as you can get here’.
He said, ‘You’re going to have a stroke and if you do nothing, you’re definitely going to lose your legs and speech and you’ll also be blind’. My optic nerve was being pushed to the side.”
Ms Brown spoke with Prof Teo on a Tuesday and the following Monday, he had removed both of her tumours in their entirety.
“They’d grown so big they had embedded into my skull, so he couldn’t put my skull back and I have metal plates there. I’m really well, I just have to have yearly MRIs to make sure nothing is growing back and I have a nine per cent chance of something growing back because I had multiple tumours.”
“I have three beautiful daughters and seven grandchildren and I’m 60 – I have too much to do. It hits you really hard when you know you’re going to have major brain surgery.
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“You don’t know how you’re going to be when you come out; there are a lot of risks. I was one of the lucky ones- my eyesight is not compromised and my eye has gone about 80 per cent back. It will take a while to go back completely.
“Charlie just does what he has to do – if something is deemed inoperable, he will have a go.”
Incredibly, Ms Brown was forced to spend two weeks in hotel quarantine after the operation, her only pain relief being paracetemol and a heat pack.
“There was no microwave in the room to warm up the heat pack and requests to the hotel were denied. It was so painful and my partner was trying to heat up my heat pack with a hotel hairdryer, which didn’t work.”
The Queensland government knocked back Ms Brown’s application to recover back at home on her acreage in the Mooloolah Valley, despite pleas from Charlie Teo.
“I asked for an exemption but was told I wasn’t an ‘exceptional circumstance’.
“The media got involved and on day 10 of quarantine we had a knock at the door. Two policemen were there, asking how long it would take us to pack up. They put us in a taxi and took us to a suite in another hotel where I had a full kitchen and was able to warm up the heat pack.”
Rather than lying around feeling sorry for herself, Ms Brown, a businesswoman who has had shoe, handbag and wine accessories businesses, hatched a plan for a new business.
In bed with pen and paper, she devised a new lip gloss range called Noosa Glow Australia and decided she’d donate part of the profits to the Charlie Teo Foundation.
“I wanted to make a little bit of a difference and give back as well,” she says. “I’m so thankful for Charlie Teo.”
Launched in November – just three months after her brain surgery – Ms Brown’s idea was to make a vegan, certified organic lip gloss with beautiful packaging.
Made in Australia, Ms Brown hopes to expand her range to include a body scrub and a bronzer.
“Every business I have started has always been unique and very glam,” she says.
“Noosa Glow is no different. The glosses come in stunning containers and I have also designed metallic mesh drawstring-lined little puches to fit a lip gloss perfectly. I hope people get as much joy as I do in having beautiful things.
“My motto is: lots of lip gloss and your sunnies and you can go anywhere.”
Visit noosaglowaustralia.com.au
• Brain cancer kills more children in Australia than any other disease and more people under 40 than any other cancer.
• There are more than 40 major types of brain tumours
• The worst type of brain cancer, GBM, is also the most common and has an average survival of only 15 months from diagnosis
• About 1600 people are diagnosed with brain cancer in australia every year. Approximately 1200 die from the disease every year
• The five-year survival rate for brain cancer is 22 per cent
*May is Brain Cancer Awareness Month
