My Story
In April 2026, at 41 years old, I was diagnosed with a grade 3 IDH-mutant astrocytoma.
That’s a mouthful. The short version: there’s a tumour in my brain. It’s been there a while, quietly doing whatever tumours do while I was running businesses, styling clients, and working my but off. It crosses the midline which apparently means it’s an overachiever and I’m being treated with surgery, concurrent radiation and chemotherapy.
I’m also a 14-year marketing consultant, a style blogger, a business owner, mentor, and someone who chose her outfit very deliberately on the first day of radiation.
Here’s what I noticed the moment I was diagnosed: nothing existed for me. There are cancer spaces, yes. There are support groups and pamphlets and websites with very bright colour palettes and stock photos of women holding hands with their grandchildren, staring at sunsets with appropriate serenity.
None of them were 41. None of them were mid-career, mid-holiday plans, mid-everything when the news comes that rearranges your entire sense of future tense.
The women I’m talking to are not in the pamphlet. They are women who are running businesses and raising children and managing households and building something — and then a tumour turns up and the entire cancer world assumes they want to be treated like they are already fading.
They don’t. We don’t.
So I’m building what I needed.
Tumour & Tulle exists for young women in the middle of our life with brain cancer who are driven, busy, passionate and ambitious and completely done with feeling invisible in every space designed to support them. It’s part journal, part styling guide, part professional survival manual, and part community for people who want to talk about what actually happens — the dark and the funny and the inconvenient and the expensive — without being handed a pamphlet about finding gratitude.
I should tell you what you’re in for.
It’s going to be messy. I’m currently on enough medication to stock a small pharmacy. My hair is doing something I’ve decided to describe as “a considered transition.” My memory is taking creative liberties with names, numbers, and the word I definitely knew five seconds ago.
But I’ve also got 14 years of marketing experience, more opinions about capsule wardrobes than any reasonable person needs, and a very specific way of seeing the world that a brain tumour hasn’t managed to take from me yet.
My prognosis is not great but I refuse to be a statistic. IDH-mutant, molecularly favourable, on the right treatment protocol. Im hoping the odds are pointing somewhere longer than my oncologist’s median sentence of 2-4 years, if I have anything to say about it. Which I do. Loudly. With footnotes.
I will write about treatment. I will write about style. I will write about what it’s like to work with this what to wear to an MRI and what dark humour does for you when the alternative is worse. I will write about all the things nobody told me, because I spent a lot of time in the early weeks Googling at 2am and finding nothing that felt like it was written for me.
That’s changing now.
Welcome to Tumour & Tulle. Thanks for coming along with my crazy brain journey.
I’m Charmaine. I have a brain tumour, a very full wardrobe, and absolutely no intention of going quietly into the night just yet.
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