Resources are only human (after all)

At 31 I was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. I was a mother of two in the throes of being hired by a big company. My world collapsed. I was scared. The company hired me and set me to work on pro bono assignments so I could have time off for treatment. Illness puts you on a whole different time scale. Your life revolves around appointments, blood tests, chemo sessions, radiotherapy and uncertainty. There’s a question constantly on your mind: “Is it working?” You’re in your own space-time. Going to work helped me stay in step with friends, my partner and my children. It’s tiring, but if you have a good support network it stops you climbing the walls. The hardest thing is dealing with all the questions banging around in your head: How can I be a mother when I’m scared I might not be around for my children? What about intimate relations with my partner? Can I be a working woman, be part of real life when I’m a patient undergoing treatment? There are some really difficult times. Like when your hair falls out. It happened at work. I was fixing my hair in the toilets and I suddenly found myself with a handful. I had to walk back through the open space to grab my bag and head home. You don’t feel human. You don’t know what to do. That’s the hardest part, I think. When your illness becomes visible to others. It shows the hold it has over your body. That’s when the world knows you’re ill. It’s there for all to see. The treatment ended almost a year after the diagnosis. I went on a ten-day business trip with my boss just after my last radiation session. It helped me envisage the future, move on. But illness did change my attitude to work. I threw myself headlong into my job. Then, ten years later, I realised I wanted to do something to give back to the society to which I owed so much. I had lived in London and in the US and I knew that I wouldn’t have had the same care as I had here in France. I did a course in ps…