About

katrina lau hammond

In 2016, my daughter was six months old and I felt something odd like a small piece of gravel in my left breast. A blocked milk duct, I thought. It soon turned into the whole breast feeling rock hard. One day I was hand expressing and there was a tiny drop of blood in my milk. I texted my mothers’ group and one of them said, “Katrina hon, you’ve got to go get that checked out.”

I was 34, young, fit and healthy. I was an ESCF Paris-trained pastry chef who had worked for Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi in their Soho restaurant NOPI. I’d worked for Jason Atherton at Pollen Street Social, his one-Michelin-starred restaurant in London. I’d cycled a clunky oma fiets through sleet and snow to get to my early morning bakery shifts in the Netherlands. Back home in Sydney I was a mum to a three-year-old and eight-month-old as well as being a freelance food photographer, food technologist, and recipe developer. I was reluctant to see a doctor, but I knew she was right.

I went to see the breast specialist who took three excruciating core biopsies. She said to me, “We can wait for the results, but I’ve seen enough to tell you that you have breast cancer”. I had no family history of it. I was gobsmacked.

Fast forward four years of relentless cancer diagnoses and cancer treatment, and I am currently battling further progression of my metastatic (stage four, advanced) breast cancer. I may not look sick, I may have a smile on my face, but I combat treatment, medication and side effects every day.

After my initial diagnosis, I wrote a picture book to help explain cancer to young children aged 3-8 years; something that was missing when I was first diagnosed. The metastatic diagnosis gave me the kick up the butt to get the book out there in the world. You know, in case I died before it was finished. The book was released in 2021. After finishing the children’s book draft, I found I needed to let my creativity express itself again. That’s where thE MAKAN AT MUM BOOK comes in.