Some days don’t arrive gently.
They arrive heavy, blurred, and demanding before you’ve had time to catch your breath.
One day, I’m sitting in a surgeon’s office with someone I’ve just met. The room is clinical yet beautiful. Efficient. Calm in a way that feels almost unreal. I’m being told that abnormalities have been found and that I’ll need a scout breast lumpectomy to remove them.
The first step, I’m told, is not the surgery itself but a procedure to insert a tracker. A small device placed inside my body so the surgeon can later find what can’t be felt.
I nod. I listen. I ask practical questions.
Inside, everything feels like a blur.
There is a particular vulnerability in being asked to trust someone you’ve just met with your body. In being told what will happen next while your mind is still trying to process what has already happened. In realising that your body is once again something to be entered, marked, altered for your own safety, but not without cost.
I leave that appointment holding information, consent forms, and a quiet fear I don’t yet have words for.
Later that same day, I’m in a very different office this time with a professor I’ve also just met. The focus shifts from breast tissue to bone. From one diagnosis to another. From surgery to long-term rare disease management.
We go through my Fibrous Dysplasia with a fine-tooth comb. Scans. History. Symptoms. Progression. He listens carefully. Thoroughly. Thoughtfully. For the first time in a while, I feel seen in my complexity.
Then he outlines the plan.
Six-monthly zoledronic acid infusions.
I already know the drug. I’ve lived the first infusion. I still carry the memory of how it made me feel – physically and emotionally. The internal scarring that doesn’t show on imaging but lives in anticipation.
As he explains the rationale, the evidence, the risks, I feel two things at once.
In control, because there is a plan.
Out of control, because my body must once again submit to something that cannot promise certainty.
Zoledronic acid is used widely in breast cancer care to protect bone and reduce complications. In FD/MAS, it sits in a greyer space helpful for some, difficult for others, still being understood. I agree, not because I am fearless, but because living without a plan feels worse.
And then, the day doesn’t end.
I leave appointments about surgery and infusions and step back into my other life the one where I am a leader. Where people rely on me. Where decisions must be made, calm must be held, and others must feel safe.
So I show up.
I chair meetings. I support my team. I hold space for other people’s challenges while quietly carrying my own. I lead while my body feels exposed, examined, and fragile.
This is the part people don’t see.
That complex health doesn’t pause for leadership. That vulnerability doesn’t disappear because you are capable. That you can be both deeply shaken and deeply competent at the same time.
Living with multiple health issues means holding contradictions – strength and fear, control and surrender, knowledge and uncertainty all at once.
This is how I keep going.
I compartmentalise. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s necessary. One box for surgery. One for infusions. One for leadership. One for fear. One for hope. I don’t open them all at once, because if I did, it would be too much.
So I take it one step at a time.
One Day, it’s the tracker.
Another day, it will be the surgery.
Another, the infusion.
And in between, the meetings, the decisions, the people who need me to show up steady and present.
I can’t rush ahead in my mind anymore. I can’t ask my body to cope with everything at once. I need deal with what is in front of me then I close that box and move to the next.
This isn’t denial. It’s survival. It’s how you live when your body is complex and your life is full.
Everyday I am learning that moving forward doesn’t mean being fearless. It means being deliberate. It means trusting myself to take the next right step, even when I can’t yet see the whole path.
And for now, that is enough.
