Meet Fiona Morgan Coleman, a Mayo-based mum who will brighten your day. Fiona is sunshine. Bottle her energy and you have a sell out. And sell outs, as you’ll soon find out, are something Fiona knows all about.
It was by pure fluke that Fiona set up an Instagram account the day she was diagnosed, aged 40, with an aggressive form of stage three breast cancer. Little did she know then, the power it would wield, how Instagram would become not just her support network that would help her through some of her toughest chemo days, but how, in time, it would also grow into a business where she frequently sells out her makeup brushes, her room sprays and her candles. Currently Fiona has 54.5 thousand followers on Instagram. But by the time you read this, that too will have grown.
It’s her positivity that has endeared her to so many. She may be living with treatable but incurable cancer, but you’d never know it because as she tells us, she literally doesn’t think about it. Instead she thinks about how she will fill her day and about how lucky she really is in the grand scheme of things.
We arrive to her house in Shrule, Co. Mayo, and find it just like her: busy.
Her sister is doing her makeup and her pals doing her hair and styling. Her boys, Callum, 10 and Pearse, 8, are in school, but her husband David is using VIP’s arrival as an impetus to get a mirror hung in the kitchen and a light fitting up in their bedroom. Fiona winks at us, as he drills! We stand in their kitchen and look out the back at a digger which is moving in a new office pod for where Fiona will now run her Instagram operation and ship the many orders she gets every day. We wonder if she’ll ship us some of her energy too!
Later, with the photos done, she tells us her story….
Fiona, you might be the most positive person we know. Your energy is effervescent. You are a joy to be around.
Ah, thank you. Every morning I wake up and I try to be positive. The minute I pull up the blinds in the morning, I’m like, ‘Right, what is today going to bring, whatever it brings, I’m going to see it in a positive light’. I think this attitude has really stood to me throughout my life.
With 54.5k followers on Instagram many know you, but for those who may not, tell us a little about you.
I grew up in Nenagh, Tipperary. I am one of 10 children, I have five sisters and four brothers. My mother was the best housewife you could imagine, I can still remember the smell of her cooking and baking. My father was a painter and decorator initially and then he joined the fire brigade and then became Mayor of the town. I grew up in a busy, loving home. The house was full of laughter and fun and music. Coming from a big family we all learned to get on with each other, this has taught me how to navigate people, it’s been a great life skill.
What were you like growing up?
I loved sport, I played soccer and did athletics competitively until I was 19. Went to college and studied science and after that went travelling the world with a backpack for two and a half years: Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Bali, Cook Islands, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, I just travelled and worked. Came back and got a casual job in a restaurant where a lot of Guards were coming through and having the degree and sport, they were like, you should really join the Guards. And I suppose being 6ft tall too it was always said to me! So, I joined the Guards in 2007 and with my love of sport and my love of people, I never looked back and I made the best friends who make a tough job so much easier. Then in May 2019 I scratched my chest and that’s when I found a lump and unfortunately for me, after tests and scans, I was diagnosed with stage three aggressive breast cancer. The day I was diagnosed I was after putting up my first video on Instagram, sharing my love of fashion and beauty.
And the irony of that Fiona because Instagram turned out to be, not just a great business for you, but it became such a supportive network.
It really did. After I came to terms with the diagnosis and after the mastectomy and auxiliary clearance (lymph node removal) I came on and told my followers, and the outpouring from people was overwhelming. My followers were the people who got me up in the morning. They were the ones who got me through my treatment. As much as they looked at me as inspiration, I looked at them as my inspiration. Their support was just unbelievable. My life changed then, and my Instagram business grew, cancer literally changed my life. Unfortunately, then in 2021 I had a reoccurrence, I found another lump, and so they started me then on a new treatment, which I’m still on now.
Tell us about this treatment.
So, the treatment I am on at the moment is a treatment for life, my cancer is incurable but you live with it. This month I am three years on this treatment which only came out in 2019. It has really worked and I am very grateful for that. I can live my life, which is great.
You take chemo drugs daily and have hospital appointments monthly, is that right?
Yes, I get two hormone blocker injections a month in the hospital and I take three tablets a day, for 21 days, 7 days off, and that stops the cancer cells from growing. No side effects for me and that’s why I’m so lucky. When they put me on this treatment, this was it, there was nothing more they could do because my cancer had spread to my chest wall and they couldn’t take that off. I had advanced breast cancer. This new treatment kills off the oestrogen because my cancer is oestrogen driven, I was trialling this, hoping for the best, but three years on, I’m still here. And just before Christmas I got a clear scan, which was amazing.
Amazing! Your next scan is in six months, do you get a reprieve initially but more worried the nearer you get to a scan date?
For me, I have made cancer not my enemy, but my friend. I don’t get up in the morning and think about cancer, I get up in the morning and think about how my day is going to go and what am I going to do to keep myself busy. I never wake up and think, I’m sick, I’ve got cancer. I just live a normal life as best I can, the only time I think about it, is the night before I go in for a scan. Thankfully I don’t get that anxiety, I mind my mind, I eat well, I take my supplements, I get out for a bit of exercise, I find sometimes you have to distract yourself, if you sit at home and think about what that cancer is doing in your body, you are allowing it to take over you and that is something I have never done. I just don’t allow it to come near me. Because that to me is a negative and I try to stick with all the positives, even though life is challenging. I just kind of get on with my life and to be honest I never think about it…I just don’t. I keep myself so busy.
You are very busy! On Instagram too, responding to the many people who contact you!
People contact me all the time and say they’re starting chemo or whatever and I try to be as honest as possible and say, you will be so sick, you will be the sickest you’ll probably ever be, but those days will pass. You will hopefully come out of it feeling better, like me, and living your best life. And you’ll be so full of gratitude being over that treatment. Chemo is a really tough one. The hair loss and the sickness is something, personally, I never want to experience again. For me, I had eight sessions of chemo every couple of weeks. You have the chemo and then they give you a steroid so you’re bounding around for two days and then once they wear off, you’re wiped. But for those days you are wiped I had a chair and I sat there and opened up a notebook and I’d write a bit, or watch tv. I let my body be exhausted and I just sat there.
Do you see your life in chapters Fiona, before kids after kids, before cancer after cancer, or as a continuum?
One big journey, I suppose. With the kids because they were so young when I got that initial diagnosis I didn’t have to tell them, they were only 3 and 2 at the time. And now six years on, Callum is 10 and Pearse is 8. The only thing Callum remembers is the hair loss because he had just started Montessori. I remember him asking at the time, ‘Where’s your hair, mum?’ but I told him people needed my hair and that it was going to grow back. But very grateful I never had to sit my kids down and tell them. They really helped me drag myself out of that chair every time they came home. Very lucky that way, I’m sure there’ll be a time when they’re older when we’ll have to talk about it, but now they see me well and looking well.
Makeup made you feel well too, didn’t it? On your bad days you say you’d wake up and do your makeup to feel better.
I love makeup, and yes, it was my therapy when I was going through treatment. Getting up and putting on a face of makeup made me feel better. When you look at yourself and don’t think you look as bad as you feel, it makes you feel a bit better.
It was no surprise really when you launched your makeup brushes before Christmas that they sold out nearly overnight! Your business is flying, how do you juggle being a Guard too.
Yep, also still a Guard, I’m on night duties in the office, not actually out there fighting crime! I work four days on, four days off. I’ve a good balance with everything, I think.
How do you find the balance with Instagram work? It must be a lot.
Instagram is my hobby so I never see it as work. I love chatting to people, I love responding to followers. A lot of people who are going through cancer contact me and I would feel awful if I didn’t respond. They could be up worrying themselves sick. And something else I want to say, I Googled my diagnosis initially and at the time I had a rare form of breast cancer and the medical paper which told me all about it gave me 12 months to live – I’ll never forget the panic. But it was a 20 year old paper! After that I said, right that’s it, I’m never touching Google again and I never have. I put it in the hands of my oncologists and doctors. Dr Google is no good!
Tell us the story about meeting your surgeon at the Galway Races, days after your mastectomy.
Oh yeah, the Galway Races were on 11 or 12 days after my mastectomy surgery. I went and bumped into the surgeon, and he held me and he said, ‘I think you are actually a walking miracle’, he was like, ‘I don’t know anyone I’ve done this type of surgery on who is up and out a couple of days later’. But I love the buzz of the Galway Races and I didn’t want to miss it! I’ve always had an attitude that everything can be done.
Where do you get this attitude from? Your mum?
I’m not sure…even my mum says to me sometimes, ‘Jesus Fiona, how have you got through all of this?’ I think it’s just my personality, travelling around the world and seeing people in third world countries, I’ve always thought, ‘God, my life could be so much worse’. There’s something very light about you, you don’t allow the darkness in. If someone comes to me with a problem I will try fix it. Now the only thing I will say about getting sick, I think I was pouring from an empty cup when I got sick. I was working night shifts, I had two small babies, they were only 19 months apart, I was trying to fix everything and everybody’s problems. And I think that affected me. Now since getting a cancer diagnosis I am more about self love and self care and I mind myself more now. I say no to things I wouldn’t have said no to before.
For people dealing with a diagnosis now and for those supporting those with a diagnosis – what do you say?
There’s nothing you can tell anybody when they are at their sickest that’s going to make them feel better. Just go through it as best you can and keep being good to yourself. One minute you’ll feel great and the next you’ll be floored. But you will come out the other side and it could be your best life because it changes you as a person. I am definitely living my best life now. I am very content, I am very happy living with cancer and it has brought me so much joy, along with the hardship. It’s changed me for the better.