Brave leader in breast cancer support
The more than 500 women who over 20 years were members of the Breast Cancer Charity Support Group of the Bone Marrow Donor Institute, a support group Avis Macphee founded in 1994, will best remember her for her support, friendship, sense of humour, enjoyment of life and willingness to engage in their struggles and provide information to assist us to make treatment decisions. Avis convened meetings in which women revealed diagnoses, planned funerals, mourned the loss of relationships and their hair, exchanged notes on their treating physicians, shared black humour and then laughed afterwards over pasta and garlic bread in a Lygon Street restaurant. The partners of some of those women who died will remember Avis as the woman who offered support and caring and an invitation to dinner after the death of the partner. She was the one who stayed in touch. Researchers will recall Avis as the tireless, well-informed advocate who educated them about the perspectives and experience of w...