It began with a sharp pain in the right breast that slowly spread like a spiderweb.

Sabrina Goh was busy at work, but the pain was “a bit alarming”, she recalled. She made an appointment to have it checked two weeks later.

While she was waiting for her appointment, she didn’t think it was cancer. “Every cell in me proclaimed that it was not cancer,” she said. 

The day came and Sabrina got her scans done. Within 15 minutes, she received a call from her doctor. 

“She said, ‘It’s really bad.”

“Is it a cyst?”

Sabrina, 40, an award-winning fashion designer of her eponymous label SABRINAGOH, had been conscious of breast cancer from early on, as it ran in her family.

“Four of six of my aunts on my father’s side have had breast cancer,” she told Salt&Light.

She had been going for breast ultrasounds every two years. These were usually uneventful: At most, the scans would show a lumpy breast.

Sabrina with her husband Jason and son Joshua at church during its Candlelight service in December 2021.

This time, in April 2021, being told there was a suspicious mass was hard for Sabrina to accept. She was only 37, and the mother of a two-year-old boy.

“Something was not right, but I still hoped,” she said. “I asked my doctor, ‘Is it a cyst?’

“She said, ‘This one cannot be cyst. We have to do a biopsy.”

In early May 2021, the biopsy results came out: There was a cluster of three masses that stretched across 16cm, and the cancer was HER2-positive.

“My heart sank,” she recalled. “My husband Jason let out a very long sigh. I felt he was more stressed than me.”

The cancer was too big for the surgeon to operate on, so Sabrina had to undergo chemotherapy to shrink the mass before surgery. She chose the earliest slot available.

Given that it was a sizeable mass, there was concern that the cancer had spread so her doctor sent her for CT scans. 

That was the first piece of good news: The scans revealed that the cancer had not spread, but was localised in the right breast. 

“Looking back, it could only be God,” she said.

Sabrina looked for various ways to style her look during chemo so that she could still go out.

The journey had its challenges: Her first time with chemo was not easy. “I had fever, my head was spinning, I was in bed for three days. I had no sense of taste.”

But miraculously, that was the worst of it. “After that, I didn’t experience any symptoms, apart from hair loss.”

After three months and six rounds of chemotherapy, she went for surgery: A mastectomy of her right breast followed by reconstruction using her latissimus dorsi (tissue from the back). This was followed by radiation.

Alone, in pain

For many cancer patients, chemo is the worst part. For Sabrina, it was going into surgery alone and being alone in hospital, and radiation.

“It was during the COVID period, and hospitals didn’t allow visitors,” she recalled. “So I went to hospital by myself to go through surgery.

“It was a weird feeling — a lot of things run through your mind.

“This was my first major surgery and I was by myself, and it was scary. I worried about many wu liao (silly) things, like, ‘What if the anaesthestic didn’t work and I could feel pain? Or what if my throat constricted and they couldn’t put in the breathing tube?” she said, laughing at the memory.

When she came out of surgery, she had to endure the pain and recover without company. 

But although she was by herself physically, Sabrina knew she was not alone spiritually. 

Leaning on God

When Sabrina received news of her diagnosis, “I didn’t feel angry towards God. I didn’t feel it (cancer) was from God either,” she told Salt&Light.

Sabrina made a list of prayers for herself, including verses friends sent her, and would daily speak out each one. She meditated on 1 John 14:15.

God also sent “angels” to her. “After diagnosis, different people came to me to prep me for the treatment,” she said.

Her mother brought a breast cancer survivor to talk to her. “She told me things like ‘Cut your hair very short before chemo, so the impact of losing your hair won’t be so big.’”

People she had never met before would come to encourage her.

A group of her closest church mates rallied around her, forming her inner circle who prayed with me, who believed with me,” she said, calling them her “community”.

Good friends from her former cell group rallied around her and formed a prayer community that she drew comfort and support from.

She also joined a group of cancer patients and caregivers in her church who met every fortnight to pray together.

One close friend from her “community” Cynthia Yen had a box of fresh fruits sent to her every month for six months.

This note accompanied one of the fruit gifts. “I keep all the prayers from different friends in my phone notes, and I meditate on them and pray every day,” said Sabrina.

“In fact, I relied on Him even more. I drew closer to God, for sure. I never prayed like that before.”

Sabrina was secure in her faith, all the more so during this period she battled cancer. But when one of her pastors from City Harvest Church, Choong Tsih-Ming asked her if she felt God’s presence, Sabrina replied, “I don’t know.”

The pastor suggested, “You can try to sense Him, and you can ask Him, ‘Where are you, Lord?’ You can commune with God.”

One time during chemo, “I tried to sense what God wanted to say to me,” she said. “I could not hear anything, but an old children’s song kept playing in my mind.”

She teared as she recalled the moment. 

“It’s a very simple song: Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so. I read all the lyrics, and through them, God said He loves me. God loves me.”

The hardest part

In July 2022, Sabrina went for her final treatment. A year later, her doctor declared her officially cancer-free — she had gone 12 months without need for any treatment.

“On the last day of treatment, the nurse clapped her hands and said ‘Congrats!’,” she remembered. “I felt that cancer was truly behind me.”

Looking back, she shared that emotionally, losing her hair from chemo was difficult. 

Sabrina at her final chemo session. Apart from adverse side effects during the first session, she experienced great grace during the course of the treatment.

“I was very conscious of how I would look without my hair. So before treatment started, I watched a lot of videos by other patients on how to wear a wig. I bought a wig — no wig cannot go out!”

But chemo was not the hardest part of having cancer. “It was the pain after surgery and the radiation,” said Sabrina.

“My wound didn’t heal properly, and healing took a while. I had to have it restitched a few times.

“I also had liquid pooling in the lat (back) area, and I had to go for treatment to have it drained. It took a few months to heal.”

She went for radiation treatment post-surgery, and was instructed to apply cream after every session. 

“Maybe I didn’t take it so seriously,” she mused. “During radiation the skin is burnt on the inside. Eventually the skin broke and peeled, so all over my entire breast, the skin was peeling.”

It was so bad she could not go out – wearing clothes risked further damage to her skin. She had to wait three weeks for the skin to heal and the inflammation to subside.

Celebrating Joshua’s fourth birthday year and a half after her final treatment. Sabrina and Jason are now discussing a second child.

But Sabrina soldiered on, taking things in her stride, believing God for the best. She and her husband are currently thinking about having their second child.

“My doctor said I can’t have children in the first five years, but she said we can start thinking about it,” she smiled, adding that Joshua recently declared they needed four people in their home so he would not be lonely.

Life reflection

When cancer hit, it was like Sabrina’s work mode switched off. “Basically, I just put everything aside. It came to me very clearly that I had to go for treatment.

“On the business side, I actually never thought too much of it, because my husband was still running it. And the retail team wasworking on the day-to-day things.

“So my biggest responsibility was to go for treatment immediately. No one else could do that for me.”

The episode brought about a big change in her. “I learned through this episode that I cannot push too hard. Before cancer I worked till very late, I was too stressed, I was taking work too seriously.”

In the midst of treatment (Sabrina wearing a wig in this photo), good friends would come and celebrate Christmas with the couple.

During treatment, she stopped designing full time. “I slowly started delegating to the team,” she said.

Succession planning had not been on the cards till her diagnosis. Jason handles the business end of SABRINAGOH and steered the business admirably through the COVID years.

Now they have put things in place for the business to continue running even if Sabrina should retire. 

“My life reflection after this is we want to do our best but not at the cost of health,” she added. 

She sees her oncologist, breast surgeon and radiation doctor every six months, and returns for scans once a year.

She has also made changes to her lifestyle: “I consciously sleep early now, I’m in bed by 10pm. Last time, sleeping like 2am was fine. But not now. I’m very conscious.”

The couple make no evening plans. After dinner, they spend time with Joshua before bed. Even their cell group meetings are now held in the day.

Her diet has also improved – “We tell Joshua: McDonald’s only once a week!”

Eating well is part of Sabrina’s new regime, along with sleeping early.

What has grown is the closeness she now feels with God. “I learned (through this experience) that I can really rely on Him. During that COVID period, no one could come into the room with me. I went into the operating theatre by myself, praying with my eyes shut, all the way.

“It was only God and me. He is close to me.”

Sabrina appeared in Tatler magazine this Breast Cancer month to create awareness of the disease. 

To anyone reading this who has been diagnosed with breast cancer, she urged, “Pray and tell God what’s going through your mind, and how you want Him to help you.

“Surround yourself with people you trust who can support you. Community is very important – don’t let yourself be alone. Join a group like the Breast Cancer Foundation, get help.”

Sabrina is trusting God with her life. “I pray for a cancer-free future, to continue doing the things God wants me to do.”