Raw photos capture the unfiltered side of cancer

It’s difficult to imagine how you’d feel if you were diagnosed with cancer at just 26.

But that was the reality for Queensland wedding florist Faye Eid. She was told she had an aggressive form of ovarian cancer and would need to start six months of intensive chemotherapy treatment.

It was an extremely painful and difficult process - more so than she and those around her expected. That’s one of the reasons her husband Jarred, a photographer, began capturing the journey and later put it together in a remarkably raw and confronting photo series.

Faye had been unwell for months before her diagnosis, suffering from persistent stomach cramps and fatigue, but doctors weren’t able to give her a proper diagnosis.

She had a cyst on one of her ovaries but that wasn’t a concern they said, until a routine blood test found cancer markers in her system.

Upon further investigation, they found that the cyst had grown to the size of a grapefruit in just five months, and Faye was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery.

It was a success, and her recovery seemed to be progressing well with Faye already starting to move on with her life. Then she received an unexpected phone call that changed everything.

It was from a cancer clinic that didn’t realise her doctor had yet to break the news of her new diagnosis; cancer.

Writing on a GoFundMe page to help support her treatment, Jarred describes the moment in detail.

“I remember walking into the room and seeing Faye in tears, I knew straight away the type of call that she had just received,” he says.

“I will never forget the feeling; everything in the world became blurry except for the news and it was so difficult to process anything else after that.

“We knew in that moment that life was going to change dramatically.”

Things progressed pretty rapidly from there, and while she was told her form of cancer was a rare and aggressive one, it had a high survival rate if they could get on top of it.

She underwent IVF beforehand to preserve her chance of having biological children in the future. Then it started.

Faye’s first day of chemotherapy was a dark and rainy one, and Jarred captured a photo of her looking out the window.

From there he went on to photograph the moment she had to say goodbye to her long blonde hair and shave her head; t he times she couldn’t go far without a sick bag in hand to throw up in, the intense pain on her face, and the many hours she just spent asleep, completely exhausted by the ordeal.

While Faye expected the physical side to be hard, she wasn’t prepared for the reactions of her nearest and dearest.

“I think people really aren't too comfortable with suffering or what to say or what to do. That was the hardest part for me, when people give you the token ‘you'll be fine’,” she tells the Daily Mail.

"When I said chemo wasn't that great, people would say, ‘you'll be okay, you need to be positive’. It made me passionate about people seeing the suffering and the mess.”

This was why Faye later gave her husband permission to publish her photographs. “We were okay with it and we wanted people to be okay with us, to show that the messiness is okay and it's not something to stay away or back away from,” she says.

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After six months, Faye finished her chemotherapy and they thought she was out of the woods, but then the unthinkable happened. She suffered a brain haemorrhage only one in three people are lucky enough to survive.

It started with an intense pain in her head and serial vomiting, before she was completely lost and unable to recognise anyone around her.

Fortunately after two days of this, she recovered and is now in remission, but the journey was an extremely frightening one.

Faye hopes that through these photos, people who are going through a similar battle will know that it's empowering to share your story and that, "Your struggle is not something to be hidden or embarrassed about, it's something that you can use to empower and help others."

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