Her life came crashing down when she was diagnosed with breast cancer six years ago, at the age of 31. “It was hard to accept as it not only made me face my mortality, but it also brought me to make a lot of difficult decisions that impacted my physical body and my self image. I admittedly went into full-blown project management mode after the shock of my diagnosis wore off,”

“I drove myself to exhaustion consulting with many doctors and researching the internet. All this while I process the decision I am going to make to part with my breasts. Then I hit a breaking point.”

“It was lunch time and I left work to see a doctor. I was hungry because I haven’t eaten a thing and I had a client meeting after, so when they ran late, I got anxious and panicked. I called my boss and ended up breaking down over the phone.

Thankfully, with his kind voice, he told me to go and eat, see the doctor and go home for the day. At that moment, I knew I needed to be kind to myself and stop putting so much pressure on myself.”

The worst for the 37-year-old banker however, was when she made the decision to go for a mastectomy.

“I felt I was losing a part of me that makes me a woman. How will others view me? Will I be able to exercise properly? I lost my real breasts and for a few months I obsessed about how they look and whether I will ever look sexy again,” she recalled.

It also didn’t help when she did hormone therapy and went into menopause, causing her to gain weight and feel more self-conscious about her body. After she got off the meds, she shed the weight but she started having chronic hives and that left her with scars and marks all around her body. These allergies made her eat less which led her to shed more weight, to a point where she was worried she may have lost too much.

“As you can see, over the years it’s been up and down. It’s a journey but in each phase, I learn something and the more important thing is I learn to love myself more and more.”

“I honestly don’t think I had a magic formula on how I coped with it after that. I just took it a decision at a time and a day at a time.”

*This is a collaboration between Rock The Naked Truth and Pink Salt