Gerda’s journey from diagnosis to remission spanned over 6 long and exhausting months. During those dark months, she underwent a mastectomy, endless sessions of Chemotherapy, and countless days where she didn’t know if she could go on. 

“I was angry,” Gerda tells me. “I was angry at the Lord. I asked him why he had done this to me. Why did he choose me? And why had he taken my mother away from me when he knew I would need her during this time?” 

However, Gerda didn’t realise just how incredibly strong she was. She continued to work throughout those 6 months. She continued to work even though she was weak from the Chemo. Even though she was losing all of her hair. Even though most of us would have long-since given up. Gerda continued on.

“One of the hardest days for me was the day they shaved my hair,” Gerda recounts. “It was then that this disease became real to me. On that day, I cried, and I cried, and I cried.”

She came to work with her wig on every day. In the summer months, she’d close her office door and take the wig off just to ease the hot flushes caused by the Chemotherapy. She recalls a story of an employee that entered her office one day and saw her with her wig off and laughs at the shocked expression he had on his face.

“I couldn’t have gotten through it without the support of my Unique Welding family,” she says, smiling. “So many of them are still here with me at work today. The support they gave me was amazing. They really showed me how much they cared for me.”

It’s difficult for me to put myself in her shoes, and imagine what it was like for Gerda 20 years ago. The suffocating fear that one must feel. The anger and resentment one must have, and the sense of being betrayed by your own body. Can you imagine the whirlwind of emotions that Gerda must have gone through?

When I ask her about it, she tells me this:

“It was hard, I won’t lie. There were days when I did want to end it all. There were days when a simple phone call from a friend pulled me out of a very dark place.” Gerda has a faraway look on her face when she says, “It was one of those dark days. I was lying on my bed at home and just crying. I didn’t know if I could do it anymore. I think that I felt like I wasn’t going to make it. All of a sudden, I heard the choir from the church across the road start singing. In that moment, I remembered a Bible verse that my childhood Sunday School teacher taught me:

But he was pierced for our transgressions,
    he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
    and by his wounds we are healed.

Isiah 53v5