Working With Cancer

After battling months of treatment, cancer survivors often find a bigger struggle waiting for them when they return to work – the apathy of employers to reintegrate them into the system.

- Melitta Ngalonkulu

BRENDA SWANEPOEL (NAME changed to protect identity) calls herself “a breast cancer warrior”.The 40-something, who works as a business developer in one of South Africa’s largest law firms, has endured the horror, discomfort and pain of the much-feared doctor’s verdict – “you have cancer!”.

We meet Swanepoel on a week day in her Johannesburg office. Beneath her warm exterior is a woman still grappling with her diagnosis, still battling to adjust to life in the workplace in the aftermath of the ensuing treatment.

“I was in the shower in December 2016 and something in me said ‘check your breast’. I used to be fairly diligent about it but I hadn’t gone for a mammogram for a long time,” she says.

She clearly felt a lump. “It was the size of a lymph node. I thought I better not be procrastinating this so I went to a radiologist,” says Swanepoel.

The doctor told her she suspected breast cancer. The words cut deep into her being, eating her up as cancer does.

“When he told me that it could be breast cancer, I knew I had cancer. I was lying on the bed and one little tear crept out of my eye.”

That evening, she got home and told her partner of 25 years that the vacations they were intending on taking on weekends would be replaced by visits to the oncologist.

In January last year, the doctor confirmed she had cancer. Her life was going to change forever.

For the next six months, cancer dictated her diary. Seeing other cancer patients at the oncologist’s ward when she went for her first chemotherapy brought a further sense of denial.

“I was like this is not really happening,” says Swanepoel.

But the reality of cancer would soon kick in. She underwent the first of three operations within a week of being diagnosed.