When I found the lump in my breast I was lying in bed reading a book and idly contemplating how good it was to finally have a job again after three months without work.
A few days before I had nearly fainted on the train the day my period started, and had spent part of the morning lying on the floor of the office with people bringing me tea and sympathy. I owe a lot to that workplace, because someone there gave me the flu soon after I had found the lump. It was the sniffles, not the lump, which precipitated me into the doctor's office, mostly to get a medical certificate so I could stay home and sniffle. While I was there it seemed like as good a time as any to ask about the lump.
I saw someone from work at the railway station as I stood clutching my scans showing the "suspicious lump". "Are you seriously ill?" she asked me, more in curiosity than sympathy. Well yes as it turned out I was.
I had only been in that workplace for a week. Luckily I had a desk at the back of the office, so I could both make and take all those phone calls about biopsies and hospital bookings away from the hearing of everyone else (and watch my boss playing solitaire for most of the day). I told a lot of people straight up, partly because I knew I didn't handle stress well and I didn't want people to think I was being a bit weird. After all, I hardly knew them. They were all really understanding, and basically told me to work when I could.
I had to work through my treatment, as I was on my own. My husband had died of cancer some years earlier when he was 31. Also, I had no sick leave. Basically, too, I wanted something to do, to get me out of the house.
One Friday, a few weeks into chemo, my hair started to fall out, dripping all over my desk. On the weekend I shaved the last of it and bought a wig. No one actually noticed, or was bold enough to comment, that I had gone from having short blonde hair to longer brown hair in a weekend. At first the wig was a way of avoiding having to explain myself, or get stared at, but one hot December day in the office I took it off. Immediately two people came and told me their own cancer stories. Later I stopped wearing it all together, and even got a henna tat. By then I had moved desks and was now sitting near a corridor where nearly everyone in the office had to walk past me.
Commenting or running their hands through my hair was a really good way for us to connect - the longer my hair got, the better I got in everyone's minds. I think they had all been really worried about me although they didn't quite say so. I was open about it; in fact, I thought there must be times when everyone wished I would shut up about cancer. But then, when I got another job, everyone in the office came to my farewell, and they all said thank you for being so open about my illness and sharing it with them.
I got a new job because I became interested in research and cancer survivorship. By chance I found a book on survivorship in a bookshop and rang the author at the University. Six months later I had a job. I guess cancer had made me a bit more daring, and ready to grasp at or create new opportunities, something I had already learned to some extent during the years of my husband's illness. I had watched him finish his law degree, work as a solicitor for several years, and then, when at the age of 31 when he knew he had little time left, give it up to do a course in arts, craft and design. This meant he spent one of his last weeks dreaming of a beach in Zanzibar, and designing a chair suitable for lying on that beach, one he had actually been to in his wandering early 20s.
I too jumped ship after he died, giving up law for a full time arts degree. Now I am finishing a Master's thesis on people going back to work after donor stem cell transplant, given mostly to people with blood cancers. Many of their experiences are similar to mine, but what I found most surprising was the number of people who told me that they had had significant cognitive problems when they went back to work, in some cases having to relearn the skills essential for them to do their work. I have also been surprised that among this relatively small group of people, every single one wanted to be at work, and doing the same work they had been doing when they got sick. I know that is not the experience of everyone - it is certainly not mine - and while many people take cancer to be a wakeup call, and change their priorities, including work, for many other people it consolidates the value of work in their lives, provides a stable place when so much else has changed, and gives them so many other things that work can provide - money, self esteem, a sense of purpose, enjoyment, and a way of making a contribution to the family and to the world.
--Catherine
