How I Survived Breast Cancer While Working a 9-to-5 and Raising Twins

I never planned on joining the club nobody asks to be part of, but there I was, sitting in a breast screening clinic in Parramatta, hearing words like "invasive ductal carcinoma" and trying to remember how to breathe. I was thirty-eight, the mother of twin boys who had just started kindy, and a full-time project manager at a mid-sized firm in Sydney's CBD. My calendar was already a mosaic of school drop-offs, client meetings, and breastfeeds only weeks earlier.

What followed was eighteen months of treatment, a corporate career I wasn't ready to give up, and two small humans who needed me to be everything. This is the unfiltered story of how I juggled chemo cycles with quarterly reports, and how leaning on Medicare, my HR department, and a few very patient friends kept our household from falling apart.

The Diagnosis and the First Hurdle

The call came on a Tuesday arvo, just as I was packing the kids' lunchboxes. I had gone in for a routine ultrasound after a dull ache I'd been ignoring for months, the kind of ache you blame on sleeping funny or carrying a toddler on the wrong hip. Within seventy-two hours I had a core biopsy, a referral to a breast surgeon at Royal Prince Alfred, and a Medicare card that suddenly felt like the most important piece of plastic in my wallet.

The first hurdle wasn't the tumour. It was telling my boss. In Australian corporate culture, there's a quiet fear around "being a problem," and I'd internalised every bit of it. I sat across from my manager, the lovely woman who still asks about the boys, and watched her face change. She didn't flinch. She asked what I needed. I didn't have a clue. I only knew that the alternative was pretending nothing was happening, and I'd already tried that with the ache in my chest.

I took the long weekend to ring my sisters in Brisbane, my mum in Wollongong, and a few close friends who had walked this road before me. I also read the first of many essays on My Fabulous Boobies, where I found the brutal honesty I couldn't get from a pamphlet. One piece in particular, the day I realised I didn't have to be brave anymore, gave me permission to put the brave face down and admit I was terrified.

Navigating Treatment Around a Corporate Calendar

Chemotherapy starts fast. My oncologist at Chris O'Brien Lifehouse laid out the schedule, and I immediately pulled up Outlook to colour-code my life. AC-T cycles every three weeks, blood tests the day before, a Neulasta injection the day after, and a steroid crash on day three. I had to find a way to keep earning an income without burning through my sick leave in the first month.

Australian workplace law gave me a safety net I didn't know existed. My GP signed me off for a phased return under a treatment plan, and HR arranged for me to work from home on infusion days. I told my closest colleagues what was happening, and three of them quietly covered a Monday morning meeting rotation so I could sleep after my Friday pump. It wasn't glamorous, but it kept me employed and kept our family on a single income when the second wage would have been wiped out by parking at the hospital and overpriced wraps from the cafe downstairs.

The Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme also took a huge weight off. Herceptin and Perjeta, which would have cost thousands every cycle, were subsidised. I sat in the infusion chair one day and did the maths out loud to my nurse, and she smiled. "Mate, this is the whole point of PBS," she said. "You focus on getting better, not on going broke." That sentence has stayed with me through every follow-up scan.

Twins, School Runs, and Sterilising Bottles Between Cycles

The twins were three when I was diagnosed and four by the time I finished active treatment. They are the kind of kids who come out running, both directions, usually barefoot. I had to keep their world normal while mine was a blur of oncology waiting rooms and drains. My partner took six months of unpaid parental leave, which in Australia is available to dads and same-sex partners under the same scheme as mums, and it saved us.

I had a little whiteboard in the kitchen. Red meant Mum was at the hospital. Yellow meant Mum was working from home but shouldn't be disturbed. Green meant Mum was having a cuppa and could be tackled. The boys learned the system faster than most adults learn a new CRM. They would tiptoe past on red days and bring me drawings of "mummy's owie" with crooked hearts.

There were days I couldn't lift them. After the bilateral mastectomy with DIEP flap reconstruction, I wasn't allowed to lift more than two kilograms for six weeks. A friend set up a meal train through the Cancer Council NSW, and a parade of neighbours turned up with trays of lasagne, curried sausages, and Tim Tams. One mum from kindy did our washing for a month. I will never forget the smell of someone else's laundry detergent, because it meant I could rest.

Energy came in weird little pockets. Some mornings I'd feel almost human, so I'd take the boys to the park at Drummoyne Oval, sit on a bench with a flat white, and watch them argue about who was Spider-Man. Other days I'd sit on the same bench and cry into my reusable cup. Both versions counted. Both were parenting.

Asking for Help and the Power of Community

I am, by nature, the person who says "yeah, no worries, she's right." Australian politeness is a superpower until you're facing a life-altering illness, and then it becomes a wall. One of the hardest things I did was ring the McGrath Foundation and ask for a breast care nurse to be assigned to me. It felt like admitting defeat.

Within a week, a nurse named Jodie turned up at my house with a folder, a list of local support groups, and a calm manner that made me realise I didn't have to navigate the system alone. She helped me apply for the partial Disability Support Pension, organised a cleaner through a community grant, and sat with me while I cried about losing my hair. Losing the hair was the bit that broke me, in a way the surgery didn't.

I also joined a private Facebook group for young mums with breast cancer, full of women in their thirties and forties comparing expanders and swapping tips on which wigs didn't make you look like a racing identity. We shared horror stories about Canteen runs interrupted by chemo, and we celebrated every clear scan with a virtual champagne. That group carried me through radiotherapy at the Crown Princess Mary Cancer Centre, where the staff knew my name and the kids by heart. If you are looking for additional legal or financial guidance around your rights at work, the team at murray meetze can be a useful starting point depending on where you sit.

Rebranding Myself After Cancer

Coming out the other side of active treatment felt like being dropped on a foreign shore. I had new breasts, a new prognosis, and a very old identity that no longer fit. The kids would point at my scars and ask questions that made my heart split open. One afternoon, my eldest asked me if the cancer was "shiny" and whether he could catch it. I wrote about that conversation in what my kids asked me about cancer that broke and rebuilt me, because it changed everything about how I parent and how I write.

I went back to work four days a week, then three, then negotiated a hybrid arrangement that let me keep my career without sacrificing the small things, like school pick-up and afternoon tea. My boss became one of my loudest advocates, and she now runs an internal mentoring program for staff going through serious illness. I didn't plan that, but I'm proud of it.

The final piece of the puzzle was giving back. I started writing publicly, which led to this blog, which led to a little corner of the internet where survivors can find a soft place to land. I also launched a small range of merch to fundraise for the McGrath Foundation, and you can have a look at the shop if you'd like to wear your support, literally.

Survival is not a solo sport. It is built in the unglamorous moments, in the car park of a public hospital, in a team meeting where you finally say the word "cancer" out loud, in a twin-sized hug that hits you right in the chest reconstruction. You do not have to be brave every day. You only have to keep going.