I was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006. As I was recovering from nearly two years of treatment, one late evening I read Susan Sontag’s Illness as a Metaphor in the library. Looking back, I know now that I knew that cancers return. As it did in my case in 2020. Cancer is rampant. This fact also remains unchanged since Sontag wrote her book in 1978. The known causes range from genetics, lifestyle choices to pollution. The costs and treatments affect different people differently. Luck, class, gender and economics make up the ranges from just about bearable to debilitating and totally finishing one off.

The emotional challenge of being a cancer patient is in part how to deal with the gamut of labels and expectations that come with the disease. The image of the illness translates, in many cases, to a slow or eventual death. Perhaps there is little else that compares to the psychological impact of such an illness. Further still, a reductive and somewhat mechanistic understanding of the nature of the disease becomes an additional problem when it is mixed up with combative language, where you as a patient are expected to fight no matter what. I found that this causes further disharmony that not only impairs self-healing, but also impedes the ability to rely on one’s own body.

I am privileged and fortunate to have made it this far- and am acutely aware of the gaps in the system that is unable to provide equal treatment for all. Spurred by these realisations, I decided to do something- and this was the start of Wellnessfund-Galle.