56 km a week. One month. One wish.

It started on a family holiday. Every January we spend a week in Noosa — same trip, same friends, a tradition our kids have grown up with. One morning Anna noticed something that seemed like nothing at all. A few days later she noticed it again.

Back in Brisbane, the GP wasn't especially concerned. Anna had four kids and had breastfed all of them, and there are common, harmless explanations for what she'd noticed. A scan found a mass in the duct, roughly where they expected one. It also found a second mass off to the side that nobody had been looking for. The biopsy confirmed the first was what they thought. The second was invasive breast cancer.

Then came the waiting. A week and a half before we could sit down with a breast surgeon and find out what any of it meant. We didn't know what was ahead, how bad it was, or what to expect, and there was no way to find out. We told a few family members and no one else, and we didn't tell our children, because we couldn't answer a single question they were going to ask.

When we finally had the full picture, the hardest part wasn't the treatment plan. It was telling the kids, one at a time, in three different ways, because what an eleven-year-old needs to hear and what a five-year-old needs to hear are not the same thing.

Anna had been given an information pack at the hospital, and among it was Mummy's Wish. She chose one of their packages: teddy bears you can record your own voice onto, and books written for children. After we'd told the kids, we gave them the bears and the books. One of them opened a book and started reading it aloud on the spot, to a younger sibling. Partway through, she stopped.

That was the moment it stopped being frightening for them. It's why Anna chose Mummy's Wish, and it's why this campaign exists.

Anna is still in treatment. Mummy's Wish is still turning up for our kids.

— Apostoli and Anna Holevas