She beat liver cancer and now she’s engaged in a new battle—to gain faster access to life-saving healthcare for the underprivileged. Sharie Ross-Tse tells us about the dark days after her diagnosis, the arduous road to recovery and the key to fighting cancer

Photography by Olivier Yoan

Sharie Ross-Tse has been feeling tired for a few months. She was also confused as to why her waistline was expanding when she was following a rigorous exercise regime. On the day before her son’s fourth birthday, she had some tests carried out to find out if her diet was to blame. Ten hours later her world was turned upside down when the city’s leading hepatobiliary surgeon told her she had a malignant three-kilogram tumour growing on her liver—and that she had less than six months to live if it wasn’t removed immediately.

“It’s the stuff of nightmares,” Ross-Tse says of that day in June 2010. “One day you’re happily planning your child’s birthday party and the next you’re looking death in the face. Cancer really is the silent killer. I had no inkling as to what was going on inside me. I assumed I was tired because of all the exercise I was doing, and it was mainly vanity at my changing body shape that drove me to the doctor. But I’ll never forget the look on the radiologist’s face when she was performing a standard ultrasound on my tummy—she stopped still and said she needed to call the head of radiology immediately. That was when I knew something was wrong.”

The head of radiology identified a large mass on Ross-Tse’s liver—hence her expanding waistline—and sent her for MRI and CT scans as well as numerous blood tests, at which point Ross-Tse’s husband, Nissim, arrived to support his wife. She had been at the hospital since 7am but it wasn’t until 5pm that her doctor finally uttered the word they had dreaded hearing all day. “As soon as I heard him say ‘cancer’, I felt my knees buckle and my whole body go cold,” says Ross-Tse. “And then I turned to Nissim and saw his face was wet with tears.”

Taken at Hotshot with photography by Olivier Yoan

Ross-Tse went back into hospital the next day for an eight-hour operation, during which two-thirds of her liver was removed. With her children Zara and Zach just six and four at the time, Ross-Tse was determined to keep the atmosphere as calm as possible. So despite their own fears, she asked her parents and close friends, including Su Lee Chen, to celebrate Zach’s birthday with him and 20 of his kindergarten friends. “My children were very young and there wasn’t enough time to explain the severity of the situation to them,” says Ross-Tse. “I’m so grateful to my family and friends for putting their own worries aside and helping my kids get through that difficult day. As I was wheeled into the operating theatre I kept saying to myself, ‘It’s my son’s birthday. I can’t die today and leave him with that legacy’.”

The post-operative period was a tense time for Ross-Tse and her family and friends as they waited to hear if the surgeons had managed to remove all the cancerous cells from her liver and, more importantly, whether the cancer had spread to other parts of her body. As with many liver cancer patients, Ross-Tse was unable to have chemotherapy because her liver was too weak to process the powerful drugs that would flood her body. This meant that if the cancer had spread, her chances of survival would be slim to none.

Learn more about the Woman of Hope by reading the full story in the June 2015 issue of Hong Kong Tatler