Was Given One Year to Live After Doctors Found Brain Tumour

Jess Michael and her husband Alan initially brushed off the unexplained bruises as a joke. A fresh mark would show up on her arm, and Alan would ask what had happened. Jess’s answer sounded harmless enough: she had bumped into a doorway.

She was not fainting or losing her footing. Instead, Jess believed she was passing through the centre of a doorway, only to misjudge the space and strike the frame. Soon, it was happening repeatedly.

“Alan, something’s not right with me,” she told her husband. “Why can’t I walk through the door normally?”

The collisions were not her only concern. Jess had already become accustomed to severe migraines that left her in bed until morning, along with visual auras, nausea and dizziness. At times, crippling vertigo made even sitting upright feel impossible, as though she might vomit.

Yet Jess was raising two young children, working in a demanding senior HR position in the mining industry and supporting a husband facing health issues of his own. Used to carrying on, she attributed much of what she was experiencing to stress.

That changed in January 2023, when persistent vertigo prompted her GP to arrange an MRI. The scan revealed a 2.2cm lesion on her brain.

Over the following six months, further scans showed the lesion was growing and changing. By August, discussions with her neurosurgeon had taken a far more serious turn. Within weeks, Jess was diagnosed with Grade 4 glioblastoma and told she could have just 12 to 18 months to live.

There was always a reason to keep going

Until the headaches, dizziness and other neurological symptoms began, Jess had regarded herself as fit and healthy. She regularly walked four or five kilometres a day and had never dealt with anything like the symptoms gradually taking over her life.

She was also someone who expected a lot of herself. Jess had worked her way into a senior HR role in the male-dominated mining industry, where 12-hour days, five or six days a week, had become normal.

‘I was a bit of a perfectionist,’ she tells Daily Mail. ‘I really wanted to excel in everything that I did.’

At home, there were two children in primary school and Alan was going through his own health problems. Jess jokes that her ‘off switch broke years ago’. Slowing down didn’t come naturally to her.

That became clear in December 2021, when she was hit by her first serious bout of vertigo just before a family cruise. Jess woke unable to sit up without feeling violently nauseous. She spent much of the week in bed, but still told work she could manage a few hours from home.

The only way she could do it was lying down with her laptop.

‘I was still trying to not let anybody down,’ she says.

So when her symptoms were put down to stress, it made sense to Jess.

‘I just put up with it’

Through 2022, Jess found ways to fit being unwell around everything else. She would feel a migraine building as she drove home from work and call Alan to warn him.

‘I know where this is leading,’ she would tell him. He would take over with the children while Jess went straight to bed with Nurofen, ice packs for her head and a heat pack for her feet.

Sleep was the only thing that seemed to help. By morning, she often felt well enough to start again. Within a day or two, the pounding headache, nausea or dizziness would return.

‘I just put up with it,’ she says.

But she was trying to find out what was wrong. She saw a chiropractor, a physiotherapist and another physio specialising in neurological symptoms. At one point, she was diagnosed with vestibular migraines and given exercises to do. Tests to see whether crystals in her inner ear could be causing the vertigo came back negative.

Nothing made the symptoms go away.

By December 2022, the vertigo returned and this time rest didn’t fix it. Jess told her boss she might need to reduce her hours or work from home. She told Alan something had to change.

She went back to her GP, who ordered an MRI to rule out anything more serious. 

‘If you’re not worried, I’m not worried’

The MRI in January 2023 found a 2.2cm lesion near the back of Jess’s brain, around the right parieto-occipital region.

Her GP described it as a cyst or tumour-like growth and explained that the area was involved in processing visual information. That finally gave some context to the problems Jess had been having with her vision and depth perception. But she was also reassured it was probably nothing to worry about.

The scans were sent to a neurosurgeon, who asked for another MRI three months later. Jess had that scan in April and met him in May. Again, she was reassured. They would continue monitoring the lesion and scan her again in July.

‘You’re a specialist. If you’re not worried, why would I be worried?’

So Jess kept working.

When she and Alan returned to the neurosurgeon after her July scan, expecting much the same conversation, everything had changed. The lesion had grown and the latest imaging had raised concern about an underlying tumour. He now wanted to take a biopsy.

Jess struggled to take in what he was saying. She remembers looking at Alan and feeling as though she was watching herself from somewhere outside the room. At one point, Alan had to explain again why she needed surgery because she couldn’t remember what she had just been told.

MORE STORY: Pete Hegseth Faces Impeachment Calls Over Scandals, Iran War

Before the operation, Jess and Alan updated their wills and powers of attorney. With their children just eight and 10, they also had conversations no parents expect to be having. Jess told Alan what she wanted him to do if the surgery left her severely incapacitated, and they talked about what would happen if she didn’t come home at all.

She wrote letters to Alan and each of the children, telling them what she loved about them, the qualities she saw in them and her hopes for their futures. She was determined, she says, ‘not to leave things unsaid’.

Then she picked up her phone and recorded herself reading each of her children’s favourite bedtime stories.

‘If I don’t live, that’s something that will be special for them,’ she says. ‘If I do live, then I’m going through recovery, and it is just something to help them go to sleep each night to remind them of me.’

She still has the recordings.

‘You’re not God’

Even after the biopsy, Jess still wasn’t expecting to hear the word cancer. Nobody had really been talking to her about it.

She met with a radiation oncologist who discussed the possibility of treating the growth with a single dose of targeted radiation. Jess came away thinking she would have the treatment, recover and get back to her life.

‘Wham, bam, you’re done kind of thing,’ she says.

Her pathology results were supposed to take around two weeks. When that date passed, a nurse called to say the sample had been sent interstate for a second opinion.

‘I knew then and there,’ Jess says. ‘I can’t explain how I knew. I just knew it was cancer and I knew it wasn’t good.’

Five weeks after the biopsy, Jess and Alan were called in to see the radiation oncologist. He told them the tumour was a Grade 4 glioblastoma. Even with treatment, he said, Jess could have 12 to 18 months to live.

Her vision blurred. She remembers staring at Alan in disbelief and consciously reminding herself to breathe as the doctor explained the treatment he wanted her to begin.

Then she looked at him.

‘You’re not God,’ she said. ‘You don’t get to tell me whether I live or die.’

‘You get to tell me my diagnosis. You get to tell me my treatment options. But you don’t get to tell me when I live and die.’

‘But where’s my tumour?’

Jess began six weeks of radiation alongside the chemotherapy drug temozolomide. When a later scan showed the tumour had grown, she began researching what else she could do to support her health while continuing conventional treatment.

She changed her diet, exercised, meditated and began taking supplements and pursuing other complementary therapies. Around the same time, her medical treatment changed from temozolomide to Avastin infusions.

Jess is careful not to credit any one thing with what happened afterwards.

‘I can’t categorically say it was one or the other,’ she says. ‘I think it was the combination of both, but I can’t scientifically prove either way.’

Her scans began to improve. The tumour stopped growing, then started to shrink.

On December 11, 2025, her mum accompanied her to an appointment to receive another set of results. Jess watched as her oncologist brought the latest scan up beside an earlier one.

‘Sorry, whose MRI results are these?’ Jess asked.

Her oncologist told her they were hers.

‘But where’s my tumour?’

When the oncologist confirmed there was no evidence of disease, Jess screamed. Her mum was beside her and, for a few moments, neither of them seemed to know whether to laugh or cry, so they did both.

Jess kept looking back at the screen. The tumour that had been there on scan after scan was no longer visible.

For Jess, the news meant something much bigger than a clear scan. More than two years earlier, she had sat down to record bedtime stories for her children because she didn’t know if she would be there to read to them herself. Now she could allow herself to think about being there for all the things that came after bedtime stories, too.

She is still being treated. Jess continues to receive Avastin every three weeks and remains under medical care, and she has written about her experience in Defying the Diagnosis.

These days, the future she wants is an ordinary one. She wants to watch her children grow up, be there for their milestones and, one day, become a grandmother.

‘I have no intentions of going anywhere.’

Jess Michael’s book, ‘Defying the Diagnosis: A Survivor’s Journey Towards Healing Stage 4 Cancer’ is available now at Amazon.