“I Just Missed Being Mum”

A leukaemia diagnosis pulled designer Edith Olsen away from a domestic routine she never knew she’d miss so much. Introducing our Full Picture story with Edie.

Edith Olsen longed for her bottomless basket of laundry. Her dirty dishes. Dinners, baths and bedtime stories. The Sydney-based mum of two wanted nothing more than the Groundhog Day monotony of household chores and family chaos when, after a shock diagnosis, normality was ripped out from under her.

“It’s the mundane things that I missed,” says Edie, sitting in the cosy, light-filled Freshwater apartment she shares with her husband and their young son and daughter.

“Before everything changed, home life was regular mum stuff - doing dishes, doing washing, more washing, food, bedtime.”

Speaking on Full Picture, a video series by The Blend made in partnership with Abbott Australia, Edie shares how just 10 months prior – in August of 2025 – her everyday life was flung into unfamiliar territory. 

Watch Edie’s story below.

It started with her noticing she’d need to catch her breath after climbing the two short flights of stairs to her apartment.

“I was super fatigued all the time. I just thought I had long Covid symptoms and then one morning I woke up and I was having these gold flashes in my eyes,” she recalls.  

Edie was told by an optometrist that she had small blood clots behind her eyes and was referred to see an eye specialist that same day.

“They did all the eye checks and my blood work, and then I got a call from Royal North Shore Hospital that night saying that my platelets were extremely low and I needed to come in within the next hour.”

After staying overnight, Edie was visited by a medical team the following morning. 

“They told me I had leukaemia and I kind of just got silent and, like, those silent tears. The news was delivered with kindness, but it was very direct and factual. A nurse stayed back with me afterwards to make sure I was okay,” she recalls.

“I was a bit overwhelmed. I think they kind of drip-fed the information to me, so it wasn’t all too much at once, but I knew that I had to start chemo straight away.”

So began a month-long stay in hospital, where Edie would undergo her first round of chemotherapy. After this, she would spend several more weeks away from her husband and children for intensive treatments, a bone-marrow transplant and to stave off school bugs in between.   

“It was really, really hard being away from them,” says Edie. “I just missed being Mum.”

Her treatments also impacted her eating, with chemotherapy affecting her tastebuds, so everything tasted bland. Meanwhile, radiation treatments gave her mucositis – ulceration in her mouth – so solid food was painful to eat. 

“My appetite was low and I wasn’t really enjoying food,” says Edie.

To support her nutritional intake at this time, her healthcare team offered an oral nutritional supplement.

“The nutritionist prescribed Ensure* and she also recommended that when I got home to continue taking it, just to help balance what I was able to eat,” Edie explains. 

“Three meals a day wasn’t quite cutting it, especially when they were smaller sized main meals because my appetite was low. Having Ensure* in between those meals really helped boost everything for me. I noticed that [it gave me] a little bit more energy and, when I was snacky, I knew that I was having something that would fill a spot and keep me going throughout the day.”

In the weeks before filming Full Picture, Edie has been back home, relishing school drop-offs and pickups, running errands and tending to endless loads of washing. Local beach walks and coffees have returned to her weekends. And soon, she’ll resume work as a freelance graphic designer and art director – not to mention her role as creative director of The Blend magazine. 

“When I was in hospital, I ended up having a feeding tube – which was a unique experience,” says Edie, explaining how she fed through her nasogastric (NG) tube for about two weeks.   

Now, having passed the 100 days since her bone-marrow transplant – a major medical milestone – Edie says her recovery is going slowly, but well.

“I just had my bone-marrow biopsy and it was showing no leukaemia, so that’s really exciting. I am feeling optimistic,” she says.

“Now, I really appreciate those everyday moments that you don’t necessarily notice when you’re in go-go mode. Slowing down has helped me be more in those moments.”

Watch Edie’s story here.

Full Picture is a video series by The Blend made in partnership with Abbott Australia.

*Food for Special Medical Purposes. Use under medical supervision.