I’ve recently become a columnist for CFNewsToday. I publish weekly on the topic of working and professional life with Cystic Fibrosis. I highly recommend you head over there to see the most up-to-date posts, but from time to time I will share them here. In the not-too-distant past, I was a wide-eyed, coffee-swilling exec with […]
Category Archives: Work
Why we must talk about illness when it isn’t life or death
I want to take a minute to tell you why Professional Sick Girl exists. It’s true, I like to write; it’s my way of connecting with the world around me. But the reason I write about the things I do is to raise the profile of people with chronic illnesses, and the many different lives […]
How to plan a career when you’re predicted to die in 10 years
I felt guilty writing the title of this post. It’s not something I’d relish reading from a friend or loved one and I can only imagine what it’s like as a parent. But I think people reading this without lived experience of illness need to understand this feeling as much as they possibly can. I […]
The Jekyll and Hyde life
Hooo boy. Illness. It is quite the ice breaker at a party. When I meet a new person I like to tell them at least once that I have a life- threatening lung condition. Sometimes I like to chat about the four different types of broad-spectrum potent antibiotics I’m on at any one time. If […]
The Tale of the CF Cinderella
Do you ever just stop and take a minute, to think about which Disney heroine you might have been in another life? Like many a millennial I often seek to take inspiration from Walt and shoehorn my experiences into the relevant cartoon princess. Say, If I were to sum up the experience of having Cystic Fibrosis […]
A lesson in vulnerability
Or, that time I mentioned my wheezy-hamster-lungs in an interview. Unsurprisingly having a life-shortening illness can make you feel a tad vulnerable at times. It can also make you feel like a superhero when you defy the odds. But there’s one context that has always made me feel more vulnerable about having Cystic Fibrosis than […]
An appeal at the eleventh hour
It’s that time of year again. Oh, you thought I meant the election? Well, yes. But it’s also around about the time of year I end up in hospital for a 14 day course of intravenous antibiotics to treat the underlying and continuous infection in my lungs. By Cystic Fibrosis standards this is nothing; it’s […]
When the brainfog hits you bad; a specialist’s perspective
I would expect, that even if you aren’t a part of the niche, tight-knit community of CF-related diabetics like me*, you will have experienced brain fog at some point in your professional career. Or cognitive dysfunction, to give it its scientific name. Maybe it was a critical moment, in a big meeting as you pitched […]
Sorry but I don’t like your air
I got offered a freelance role recently. Successful agency, a big new business win to work on and, it goes without saying, some financial security. I turned it down. I could almost hear the recruiter thinking when I told her my decision, “is she crazy or just plain stupid?” Of course, she was nothing but pure […]
With every percentage
That scrappy bit of paper above is a list of life ambitions I wrote, aged 18. You can see I didn’t exactly hold back.
