Felicity’s Story
Halfway through my first chemotherapy cycle, my father died suddenly. One moment I was counting days between infusions; the next, I was planning his funeral, scheduled quickly to fall between chemo cycles.
The day before the funeral, my hair fell out. I looked in the mirror, bald, hollow-eyed, and felt stripped of everything familiar: my health, my energy, my father, my identity. The next morning, I stood in a church full of mourners, terrified my headscarf would slip and convinced everyone was watching. Exhausted, I didn’t know how I would survive the day, let alone the cancer. There is no guidebook for losing a parent while undergoing chemotherapy. I swallowed my grief and focused on my treatment.
I am now two years beyond the end of active treatment for breast cancer. At this stage of my ‘cancer journey’, I find myself drawn to other women’s stories. They often make me cry, but they also help me understand something important: every cancer experience is unique, yet so much of it is deeply shared. I am sharing my story because not everyone’s cancer follows the neat arc of diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. I didn’t realise how much of my story would happen alongside the cancer, not because of it. My diagnosis and treatment, like that of most cancer survivors, were confronting, daunting, painful, and deeply distressing, and they marked a defining moment in my life. Just as many people now measure time as pre- and postpandemic, I mark my life as pre- and post-cancer. But cancer wasn’t my only hardship. Life kept demanding more from me just when I had the least to give. This is a story about cancer and—grief, caregiving, and betrayal. In those early days, the advice poured in: focus on treatment, stop work, say no, let others care for you. They told me “this year just focus on you.” I only realised recently that the most difficult parts of my story weren’t the cancer itself. It was everything that was happening at the same time.
As co-executor of my father’s will, I spent hours waiting in bank queues, my body aching with fatigue, clutching paperwork with fingertips still numb from treatment. Legal processes don’t wait for illness. Life didn’t pause, even when I desperately needed it to.
My mother, elderly and grief-stricken, had health struggles of her own. She couldn’t care for me; I had to care for her. I found myself taking her to medical appointments and then attending my own. On one particularly memorable occasion, I took my mother to hospital and was admitted myself the following day. When my treatment eventually ended, everyone around me took a breath. “You did it,” they said. “The only way is up from here.” “You must be so relieved it’s over now.” Then, when I thought the worst was behind me, I discovered my long-term partner had cheated on me throughout my diagnosis and treatment. While I lay awake at night, my head feeling like it was on fire, grappling with pain, fatigue, and my own mortality, he was secretly building a life with someone else. Even on the morning I learned the truth of his betrayal, I had to attend a meeting with my mother’s cleaner. I sat there over coffee discussing schedules and housekeeping while the foundations of my life were quietly cracking beneath me. It was just another responsibility to manage before I allowed myself to fall apart.
The heartbreak hurt more than the chemo. It was one thing to confront a life-threatening illness; it was another to face the deliberate cruelty of the person I trusted most. Suddenly single, my life was unrecognisable, my imagined future gone, and the life I believed I had lived exposed as a lie.
“Life doesn’t stop for cancer, and the hardest parts are not always the ones we anticipate. Sometimes the real story is not about coping with disease but surviving everything that happens around it.”
Looking back, I am often told I was strong. The truth? I simply kept moving. Not because I felt brave, but because survival is sometimes quiet. It is brushing your teeth. It is going to work. It is showing up for your mother when you desperately need someone to show up for you. The visible parts of recovery are often celebrated—the “I beat cancer” milestones. But for me, survival is layered. It includes grief, loneliness, and pain that no one claps for. Cancer changed my body. Loss and betrayal changed everything else. These were my challenges, but I know many cancer patients carry their own impossible loads. Parenting, financial pressure, caring for others, keeping a job—life doesn’t always wait for you to get well. What I have learned is this when you have cancer and more, it is OK to cry an ocean of tears. It is OK to only be able to look as far ahead as tomorrow. This is an exercise in endurance. Simply waking up tomorrow and doing it all again, even when today felt impossible, is enough. If your cancer experience does not look like what others expect, please know you are not alone. Life doesn’t stop for cancer, and the hardest parts are not always the ones we anticipate. Sometimes the real story is not about coping with disease but surviving everything that happens around it. These days, physically I’m OK, but emotionally I’m still fragile, still grieving, and still learning to live with the trauma I’ve endured. I am fortunate to have wonderful friends, family, and a healthcare team who continue to walk alongside me. Thank you to the team at BCRC for your ongoing care and support. And a special thank you to the Psychology service—for the tissues, the time, and for holding space for the stories that don’t fit the expected script.
Share Your Story
Are you a patient of the PBCI and would like to share your story with breast cancer as part of our Stories of Hope series on our website and Newsletter?
We love hearing our patient’s stories and sharing them with others at the very beginning of theirs. For more information on how to be involved, contact us.
