Emerging from the pounding surf, Aussie marathon swimming legend Linda McGill felt paralysed by the horrified gazes of other beachgoers as she walked back to her towel. What Linda saw in their eyes left her breathless and stunned.
“One woman let out a scream and then threw her hand over her mouth,” recalls Linda. “Another woman just stared at me in disbelief. And then a little boy turned to his mother and cried, ‘That lady hasn’t got a nose, Mum’.”
Linda suddenly realised that the plaster bandage she had worn over her face had washed off in the surf. Yet as hurtful as the comments and stares were, Linda is a tough and proud woman. She placed her hands over her face, over the gaping wound where her nose had been before she contracted a life-threatening skin cancer, and strode calmly to her car, head held high.
Today, 16 months after her harrowing diagnosis with skin cancer, things are looking up for Linda. The tumour, she says, is gone, removed in an operation that also took two-thirds of her nose. The wound that caused such horrified reactions is also gone, replaced by the nub of a new nose, a work-in-progress formed with a piece of rib bone to re-create the bridge, and skin and tissue from other parts of her body.
There is a large scar across her forehead, where a flap of skin was harvested to form her new nose’s soft tissues. And there are other, less apparent scars, too.
“I feel like I’m finally getting my life back, slowly,” Linda says, pouring coffee in the kitchen of her Gold Coast home. “It’s been a long struggle and there were times when I truly wondered whether it was all worth it.
“Discovering that you have cancer is shocking, but then finding out they have to cut off your nose is horrendous. Now that I have my nose again, there’s some light at the end of the tunnel.”
Linda’s skin cancer was diagnosed in December 2005, after she noticed bleeding from her nose that wouldn’t heal. A biopsy revealed cancer, the result of a life lived outdoors.
“I don’t think I have ever cried as much in my life,” she says. “And then the doctor told me that they’d have to remove my nose. It was the most devastating thing I have ever been through.”
For the full interview, see this week’s issue of Woman’s Day (on-sale April 30)
Linda’s autobiography, Surviving The Sea Of Life, is published this month by New Holland, rrp $29.95.
