ALL WE CAN DO IS JUST TAKE EACH DAY AS IT COMES

JUST months after Ailsa Mackenzie lost her partner to kidney cancer, the unthinkable happened. The 44-year-old from Darnley was told she had breast cancer.

“It was horrific, unbelievable,” she recalls. “I felt like it was happening to someone else. What I was most worried about was my son. Barnaby had just lost his dad and suddenly, I had cancer too.”

Ailsa’s partner Robert Jones, well known and respected as a director and actor with Scottish Opera and the Citizens Theatre, was diagnosed with advanced kidney cancer in April 2015 and died in January, last year.

“By the time he was diagnosed, it was already stage four, and incurable,” says Ailsa. “He’d had a pain in his side for a while, but when we got the diagnosis, it was a complete shock.”

The couple met at Scottish Opera, where Ailsa, who is now freelance, was working as marketing manager. She had moved up to Glasgow from County Durham and now lives in Darnley on the South Side of the city, with nine-year-old Barnaby.

Discovering she had breast cancer was a bolt out of the blue.

“I’d been fine, I just noticed a little dimple on my breast – there was no lump, I had no other symptoms but after everything that had happened to Robert, I thought I should get it checked out,” she explains.

“I couldn’t believe it when they told me. The tumour was tiny, just seven millimetres wide, but I needed a lot of treatment.”

Ailsa was diagnosed in November 2016. After a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery in January this year, she was told the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes and she needed chemotherapy, radiotherapy and further drug regimes.

“It was pretty harsh, to put it mildly,” she says. “It was rough on my body, especially after the surgery. And to go in to hospital every week for chemotherapy, and then every day for weeks for radiotherapy, and be a mum and try to work…it’s exhausting. Suddenly, you are in a whole new world you had no idea existed before, and it takes over your life.”

Also battling grief following Robert’s death, Ailsa admits it has been a difficult year.

She adds: “Some days it’s fine, but others are harder. But I have Barnaby, and he’s the main thing. He’s the most important thing in all of this.”