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It was standing room only at St Augustine’s Church in Neutral Bay on Thursday as family and friends gathered to remember Jenny Piper, the woman whose story of medical misogyny resonated with tens of thousands of readers.
Piper died of cancer on June 8 after years of her symptoms being dismissed as menopausal and a key finding on a CT scan was overlooked.
At her funeral, she was remembered for her generosity, optimism and unwavering faith.
It was her Christian faith that sustained her after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2024, almost a decade after she first reported her symptoms to a GP.
Just a few days after her 60th birthday, Piper died in hospital surrounded by her family.
Her husband, Bruce, and their three children, Sarah, Anna and Ben, each described Piper’s life since her diagnosis as her own “deep valley”, as in Psalm 23, a passage that she often returned to in her final months. Even as she walked through that valley of the shadow of death, she feared no evil. She was comforted.
Amid the grief was an undercurrent of deep warmth for the woman who contained multitudes: a believer, bird-watcher, traveller, homebody, entrepreneur, friend, wife, mother and grandmother.
“And such a lot of fun,” Piper’s family told this masthead.
For Bruce and her children, Piper’s death is still surreal, as if they were “players in a movie that we are watching from afar”.
“None of us has really come to grips with the fact that she is gone.”
“The one thing she wanted to do was to die well,” Bruce said through tears at the lectern of the church he and Piper attended every week. “Jenny, I think the outpouring of love and respect in recent days shows you did that to perfection.”
To readers of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, she will be remembered as an advocate for women whose pain has been dismissed.
Piper was the first woman to publicly share her story in the course of the mastheads’ “medical misogyny” investigation. She was among more than 2000 women who reported their experiences navigating gender bias in the Australian healthcare system.
Piper wanted her doctor to consider other causes and avenues of investigation for her inexplicable weight gain, her hair loss, paper-thin skin and fatigue. But she said her GP told her it was menopause and that she just needed to lose weight, assuming this was the cause of her complaints, not a symptom to be investigated.
In June 2022, after an unrelated operation to treat varicose veins, a chance finding on a CT scan of a three-centimetre suspected adrenal adenoma – a type of benign tumour – was overlooked.
By the time the tumour was discovered – after Piper herself found the old CT scan report – it had more than doubled in size and was cancerous.
The tumour was removed in 2024, but the cancer returned 10 months later and had spread to her liver, lungs and spine. She was given months to live.
Piper had Cushing’s syndrome, a rare hormonal disorder caused by prolonged exposure to high levels of cortisol that are often due to tumours on the pituitary or adrenal glands that can become cancerous if left untreated, as happened in her case.
“The biggest thing is, listen to your body and yourself,” Piper said. “You know best.”
This is why Piper first contacted our mastheads, her family said. “She wanted women to not be afraid to advocate for themselves.” She succeeded.
Readers recall Piper’s story more than a year after it was published in April 2025, telling our reporters that she prompted them to seek a second opinion, change doctors or speak up for themselves during medical consultations. They expressed their gratitude that Piper had done so and their admiration for how brave she was.
“Jenny definitely didn’t expect the reaction that came from the story. We felt it was so brave of her to put herself in the public eye,” her family said. “Particularly with a photo. She hated having pictures taken of herself.”
Scattered around the lectern were bird houses that Piper had collected, each filled with flower arrangements, representing two hobbies that brought her comfort as she traversed her deep valley.
Piper had joked about organising the floral arrangements for her own funeral when she first met our reporters.
She chose to stop aggressive treatment that may have helped to briefly extend her life but made her feel more unwell. She just wanted to soak up every last drop of time she had with her family.
“One of the things that gives me great peace to know is … Mum was not afraid of death”, her daughter, Anna Piper, said. “She knew where she was going.”
“This is not the end of her story. The Lord was her shepherd, and now she’s home.”
The “medical misogyny” investigation is ongoing.
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