Young, healthy and pregnant, Talia Cooper’s world was flipped on its head when she discovered a lump on her breast. She spoke to Fiona Rae about becoming a mum and going through cancer treatment at the same time. 

If there’s one message that Talia Cooper has for young women it’s this: know what’s normal for your body and if something feels off, go and get it checked out. 

Cooper should know. In June last year, at age 30, she was diagnosed with an aggressive breast cancer, just 10 weeks after she gave birth to her first child. What followed was a whirlwind of appointments, treatment, surgery and illness before her return, a year later, to a relative sort of wellness. 

“One minute I was young, healthy, about to become a mum, and then so much was suddenly taken away from me,” she says. 

“So much happened in such a small amount of time, my brain literally can’t comprehend it.”

It all began with a lump in her breast when she was 29 years old and six months’ pregnant. Despite having grown up with her mum getting mammograms, Cooper didn’t think it could be cancer: “I was pregnant, so my body was changing.”

The Spinoff is holding a Pink Ribbon Breakfast in Auckland to support Breast Cancer Foundation NZ’s vital work. Join host Stacey Morrison on July 28: tickets – in the form of a donation – are available here.

The money raised will help fund groundbreaking work by some of our country’s top breast cancer researchers, educate people about breast health, and provide free support services for breast cancer patients.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in New Zealand women, with roughly 3,300 diagnosed every year. More than 650 die annually, with Māori and Pasifika women at greater risk. Despite that, and even though Breast Cancer Foundation NZ advises women to start checking their breasts from age 20, the message that young women are at risk of breast cancer is one that sometimes goes neglected. 

Cooper wishes now that she had been more aware, but she also strongly believes that better information is needed for younger women. 

“I remember going into offices and waiting rooms and there were all these brochures of older women. I was already struggling and that made me feel even more alone, like I didn’t belong there.”

About 75% of breast cancers are diagnosed in women over 50. Of all breast cancers in New Zealand, 5% are under 40. While that number may seem relatively small, it still means that around 150 women like Cooper, still looking forward to motherhood, are diagnosed each year.

Breast cancer in younger women tends to be more aggressive, so it’s important to catch it early. Once Cooper’s cancer was diagnosed as invasive ductal carcinoma breast cancer, her doctors swooped in with a treatment plan that included chemotherapy, mastectomy and, as Cooper and her husband Jesse were still planning for more children, IVF.

“Everything moved so quickly – I barely had time to process it all. I was drowned in so many appointments, scans and blood tests. On the Tuesday, I was under general anaesthetic to get the portacath inserted. On the Wednesday, I was sedated in order to harvest my eggs. Then on Thursday, the chemo started, which took all day. This all happened within one month of my diagnosis.”

The process was so shocking that Cooper can’t recall telling her closest friends or family, but this is the part of the story where the power of community comes into focus. When Cooper and her husband were faced with an $11,000 bill for IVF and another $23,500 for an unfunded chemotherapy drug, they had to find the money “in the space of a week”. Friends mounted a fundraiser and raised the money to cover their costs.

“I’ve been inundated and overwhelmed with so much love and support, like with meals, people donating to the fund – Anika Moa did a performance for us,” says Cooper.

“My community has been amazing. I am quite resilient, but I’ve learned that part of resilience is asking for help. I would say that the reason I’m doing so well is because of my community, my friends, my family.”

Although people often want to help when they have a friend in need, knowing how best to pitch in can feel difficult. Cooper says that her experience has taught her a lot about how and when to offer assistance.

“I’ve learned that when people are going through grief or hardship, to be more direct – instead of asking ‘let me know when you want me to drop off dinner’, just tell them: ‘I’m going to drop off dinner on Wednesday or Thursday’.”

To help her unpack everything she’s been through, Cooper has been working with an ADHB psychologist. “I have a lot of light-bulb moments and it makes me understand the situation and myself more.” 

After experiencing a post-mastectomy side effect in her arm called cording, she was funded for lymphoedema therapy by Breast Cancer Foundation NZ and attends a physiotherapy rehab class, also funded by the foundation. The physical effects of her journey have been severe.  

“I’ve gone from this young, fit woman to someone who’s had a pregnancy, given birth, had a caesarean, breastfed, done six rounds of chemo, had a mastectomy, a reconstruction and lost my hair. I’m 10kg heavier,” she says.  

“My body’s gone through trauma, so the physio is helping me ease my way back into exercise. I just feel weak, that’s my biggest thing – I don’t feel strong.”  

The foundation’s fundraising Pink Ribbon Breakfasts have had to be delayed due to Covid-19, but once again, Cooper’s community is rallying. Two groups of her friends are hosting breakfasts where she will be the VIP. In the future, Cooper thinks it will become a tradition – an acknowledgement of the assistance she’s received throughout her treatment and recovery. 

“I’m so lucky to have these support services wrapped around me,” she says. 

Cooper is not entirely out of the woods. She will be taking a hormone therapy drug for the next 10 years and is currently receiving intravenous Herceptin. Her body is still recovering, and she is still processing this experience. She’s also grateful for how far she’s come and how lucky she was.

“I always knew that if you walked down the road you had no idea what was happening in people’s lives, but this has made it more apparent. I’ve had so many losses and a lot of things to be rightfully upset about or grieve, but I’m so grateful and so lucky.”

Russell Brown talks to Auckland business RUSH about the challenges and rewards of being an ethical business in the competitive world of technology design.

“We design technology to better serve humankind.”

It’s the first thing you read on RUSH’s website, and it’s also written on a banner in the middle of its Parnell office. It’s the purpose statement that emerged from a staff-led process to define what the Auckland-based tech-design company exists for. And it is, acknowledges creative director Terry Williams-Willcock, a high bar to meet.

“We certainly found that when we first wrote the words,” he says. “It’s easy to challenge and it’s sometimes hard to justify. It means we’re constantly ensuring that we are being challenged by our own staff as much as ourselves and we’re going, ‘is this the right thing to do?’ Then we can have a conversation with our clients and go, “Look, this is what we believe in. Do you believe in that? How are you proving that?” And we have challenged a few clients on that side of things.”

The chance to succeed commercially while doing meaningful work is clearly a key reason why Williams-Willcock and others are at RUSH, and one high-profile project that ticked those boxes was the Kupu app for Spark. The design and build process behind the popular translation app involved working with Spark, Google and – crucially – advisors like Dean Mahuta, senior lecturer at AUT and Māori language researcher at Te Ipukarea, the National Māori Language Institute.

When asked about where the business’ ethical focus originated, Williams-Willcock gestures across the table to Danushka Abeysuriya, who founded RUSH in 2009. Abeysuriya, “Danu” to his colleagues, stepped back from the senior role at the company to be its technical lead in 2013, but is still very much the soul of RUSH.

Abeysuriya, whose family came to New Zealand from Sri Lanka via Zimbabwe, escaping trouble in both places, was only just out of university when he co-founded the P3 Foundation with Dr Divya Dhar – with the lofty goal of ending extreme poverty, globally.

The ethical base he carried through into RUSH is, he says, more important than ever in the context of the company’s growing work with artificial intelligence technologies and computer vision in particular.

“One thing we recently added to our release checklist is checking our algorithms for bias. Before we release software, we have a process to verify that we are not introducing any form of bias,” he says. “We also treat privacy as an important factor in all of the technology we develop – [for example], we’re adding in the ability for our computer vision software systems to automatically blur faces. By default, it will protect the privacy of individuals in any images being analysed, and a user will have to justify taking that out.”

RUSH’s AI work was harnessed for meaningful purpose when the company’s staff sat down to discuss a response to the looming Covid crisis back in February. Already working on a digital platform for mental health social enterprise Ignite Aotearoa, the RUSH team expedited their work in order to launch during lockdown, getting wellbeing resources and video content into the hands of essential workers and the general public. Lockdown also saw the launch of Aroha, a digital chatbot designed to help young people manage the stress and isolation of the pandemic and built by University of Auckland researchers on the back of the RUSH-designed Headstrong platform.

Both align with what RUSH chief executive Pavan Vyas characterises as a company resolve to address “wicked problems”.

“We’re in the middle of a pandemic, there’s an ageing population, associated economic and political upheaval, high suicide rates, cyber security issues, data privacy issues, all those things. As a design tech company, it creates a very big choice: which side of fence do we fall on?”

It’s quite a remarkable trajectory for what was, when Vyas came aboard in 2016, still largely a game developer – albeit one with stellar international clients like Disney and Microsoft. But Vyas says the gaming DNA is still a key part of what RUSH does, firstly in its attention to engineering excellence.

“What’s special about games designers and game developers is they inherently care about customer experience. Games would be useless if they weren’t fun. So when our engineers build stuff, they want to make it fun. They want to make it intuitive. They want to make it fast. That’s the DNA.”

Secondly, says Vyas, it’s the sense of play. When Starship Hospital came to RUSH with a broad brief – it had funding for new digital tech in its ED room and was open to ideas – the company sent a small team in to sit in the room over several days.

“We just observed all the things that were happening. Things like kids running around and stressing their parents, or kids being pretty nervous, because a lot of them would be going to the hospital for the first time in their lives. What might be two or three things which would really make a big difference to the emergency room environment, which is probably the most stressful room in the country.”

The result was the Magic Forest: a room with a giant play screen that fosters calm by rewarding slow, gentle movements with visualisations of brilliant birds and flowers. Move too quickly and the birds disappear; be gentle and they return. There’s also Starship Animal Check-ups – a triage tool presented as an animated wall that measures children’s height, heart rate and temperature – and also sees when they’re smiling.

“I think the one of the things that has come from RUSH having a history in gaming is that people come here because they enjoy creating things for others to enjoy”, says design director Stephen Horner. “We’ve just increased the scope of that to go after bigger problems.”

There’s science at work too. The Starship installations were tested and iterated repeatedly before going in. It’s an approach RUSH UX specialist Chloe Fong likens to “the methodology seen in the traditional hard sciences. We gather research about the users’ attitudes and behaviours and make hypotheses, test them by building something and releasing it to the public, and learn by looking at how people are using it with analytics data. This is not a linear process.”

Not every job is like Starship. RUSH is still a commercial business and sometimes it will pitch for a job that challenges its goals. Abeysuriya says that before the team took on the job of designing the popular Fastlane application for Z Energy, there was a company-wide discussion about whether that met its purpose statement.

“At a basic level, what Z does is sell fuel, right?” he says. “You go, well, clearly, that doesn’t better serve humankind. You could walk away at that point. But they’re looking to the future. They are a key player in the market and have the ability to influence the market. And if we were able to help them in the journey that they’ve already committed to – transforming and being the only fuel company in the world that acknowledges that it contributes to climate change – then we can make a meaningful dent.”

The ability of the two companies to “respectfully challenge each other occasionally” is part of what makes Z’s relationship with RUSH an “awesome partnership” says Z’s Hudson Dimock. He says he admires the innovative way that RUSH uses technology to solve tricky customer problems, which “aligns strongly with Z’s recent focus on innovation and digitalisation.” The nature of the partnership has allowed the two companies to “grow and mature together” in their three years working together, says Dimock.

The staff discussions at RUSH sometimes make their way out into the world. It’s a company with an unusual multiplicity of voices. The company website carries blog posts by team members, often expressing quite personal takes on technology, business and society. When Fong became a team leader for the first time recently, she was asked to share her thoughts about “human-centred leadership” on the website. She says that invitation was an example of why culture is so important” in a modern workplace: “Not only having a voice but being listened to is key to driving empowerment.”

Wellbeing, culture, making the world better: it might seem a curious place for a former big-three consultant like Vyas to be leading things.

“I need to be careful here,” he chuckles in deference to his old line of work, “But I guess you’d buy a [consultant] for a different reason than you’d buy a RUSH person, right? People buy us when they want to take risks.”