When Caroline Lucido found a lump in her breast one evening in January 2016, life was already full. She had just moved from Cape Town to London, her daughter Sasha had turned one, and she was in the middle of a career change into coaching and mindfulness. “I was juggling a lot,” she says. “A new city, a new job, and a very small human.”
The lump felt like a golf ball, unmistak-able, but cancer wasn’t the first thing that came to mind. “I thought it might be something benign. I wasn’t panicking.” Even after a surgeon said surgery was needed, she felt oddly reassured. But during that operation, they found a tumour the size of an orange.
From that moment, everything changed. “I had this strange feeling on the Tube ride to get my results, like my life was about to split into before and after.” When the doctor said the word “cancer”, she didn’t cry or panic. “I was listening, but also kind of floating. I remember thinking, ‘Okay. So it’s gone now. I’m healthy again.’ And that thought stuck with me through everything that followed.”
Caroline had two surgeries, six rounds of chemo, and 31 sessions of radiotherapy. She chose to fast for three days before each chemo session – something she’d researched and felt comfortable with. “I’ve never been a fan of medication, so I was looking for ways to support my body without rejecting the medical side.”
She coped surprisingly well with the treatment. “I braced for the worst; the dramatic side effects. But after the first chemo, I went jogging the next day!” She lost her hair, but didn’t wear a wig. “It was weirdly empowering. I liked seeing myself stripped of everything. No hiding.”
The hardest part, she says, wasn’t physical. “It was how people looked at me like they didn’t know what to say. Illness makes people uncomfortable. I get it, but I also didn’t want to pretend everything was fine when it wasn’t.”
After treatment ended, things felt strangely quiet. “No more appointments, no more plans. That silence was tough.” But Caroline leaned into the tools she already had: mindfulness, coaching, meditation. “It was like I’d trained for this moment without knowing it.”
She and her family moved in with her parents in France during the worst of it. “Having that support was great. And Sasha was so young; we didn’t know how my body would respond.”
Nearly a decade later, Caroline is still coaching, helping others bring more meaning into their lives. She didn’t end up having another child. “At the time, I pictured a baby at forty. But it didn’t happen. And somehow, it still feels okay.”
This summer, she, her husband, and now 10-year-old Sasha are heading off on a family world tour, not in search of anything, just to live life more fully. “We’re not putting things off any more. We want to experience things together now, while we can.”
It’s not a story of big declarations or grand victories, just a very human one. A woman, a family, and a life that kept going, sometimes quietly, sometimes not, and found its way forward.
