Staying Creative While Fighting Breast Cancer
As Huge Design Director Cátia Oliveira underwent treatment, her positive attitude helped her stay connected to family, friends, and colleagues.
Cátia Oliveira was working with Nike to launch a World Cup 2018 campaign when she received her breast cancer diagnosis. “I was living a really, really healthy life — eating healthy food, doing exercise…and this happened,” Oliveira recalls. She saw the project through to its launch two months later, then had surgery shortly thereafter to remove a tumor.
After months spent on treatment, the design director was ready to get back to work in January of this year, joining Huge as design director out of the agency’s London office, where she’s quickly built a reputation for being an optimistic, positive person as well as a mentor to women in the creative industry through such organizations as Creative Equals, SheSays, and Facebook.
It’s not a surprise to learn that when Oliveira got her diagnosis, she refused to let fear or negativity get the best of her. Instead, she got right to work on getting better for herself, for her husband, Pedro Vilas-Boas (group creative director at AKQA London), for her son, Noah, for her nearly 20-year-old cat, Chucky, and for the rest of her family and her friends, and she was confident she could do so.
“I think a positive attitude changes everything,” she says.
A native of Portugal, Oliveira, who has 15 years of experience in integrated marketing and design, received her initial treatment in Lisbon, relying on her parents to help with childcare as well as her recovery. She began chemo and radiation soon after surgery, and in the fall of 2018, she and Noah returned home to London, where she has continued to receive medical care.
She finished her last targeted treatment, herceptin, in early April and will stay on hormone therapy for five years, she reports, adding, “I feel that my life got back to normal, and I’m feeling great!”
Here, Oliveira takes Magenta through her diagnosis and offers her thoughts on how to live with cancer while fighting it, the benefits of being open about one’s life and struggles at work, and balancing the demands of motherhood and a creative career.
Office life
I’m an early bird. I like to start around 8:30 a.m., have a coffee and water my plants. The silence helps me to concentrate, check and answer emails and organize my agenda. When everyone arrives around 9:30 a.m., we normally have a standup about the projects and priorities on that day. My day is always pretty busy, but I always try to sit down with the team to have lunch and talk about different things. My day is filled with meetings, work oversight, and I’m involved on internal projects, too — conferences and talks. I leave the office around 6 p.m. and become Noah’s mum. I love both sides of my life — pixel-perfect design director and imperfect mum.
Organization is everything
It doesn’t sound creative, but everything in my house needs to be super aligned. If you look in my living room, my books are aligned, and they’re aligned by colors. Everything is organized, and I apply this to my job. All the details — I’m about the details of a project. Everything needs to be perfect. Even my desk is organized. I have two plants aligned on the left-hand side, and my laptop is centered. You think it’s against what a creative person should be, which is messy, but I cannot be like that.
The diagnosis
The way I was diagnosed was a bit different from other people, because normally you feel something, or you have some sort of pain, or you have been diagnosed at a routine appointment, but it wasn’t like that for me. I was diagnosed literally one year after becoming a mom for the first time because I wanted to have breast implants. I wanted to go one size up after having my kid. I booked the surgery with one of the best surgeons, and she asked me to do a mammography, even though I wasn’t 40 — I was 36 at the time. She said, “Let’s do it just to make sure everything is alright, and then we can go and do surgery.” So that’s how I found out that I had breast cancer.
Keep the routine
Some people get really depressed and try to isolate themselves, and what I tried to do is exactly the opposite. I tried to connect with old friends, with my family. I tried to make the most of the connections I could.
I tried to keep the same routine. Just to do some gym, or just to go to some classes. Just to fill my time, basically. I tried to be as busy as I could. The more you keep your mind busy, the more you don’t relate to the disease, which is a good thing, I think. Life doesn’t stop, and you shouldn’t stop living.
I was trying to be the same person in even the way I looked. I could never leave my flat without makeup, for example. I was just like, “That’s me. That’s who I am. I am not losing myself.” Even with less hair, or no hair — it doesn’t matter. I cut my hair before I did the chemo. That way, I felt like I was in control of everything, instead of the other way around.
Don’t be afraid to go back to work
I was in Lisbon, and I did stop working when I started chemo and radio, and then I got back to doing small jobs for Nike. I decided to come back to London again in October. I transferred all of my treatments to London, and in December, I said to my husband, “I want to go back to work, and I want to feel normal.” So that’s what I did. I sent my portfolios out in December, and I got hired by Huge.
Be transparent with your colleagues
I think when you go through this kind of thing, the first thing that you try to do is hide it from everyone you work with. For some reason, there is a stigma around cancer. You don’t want to share it. You don’t want to tell people you’ve been through this. So when I did start talking about this, I had a lot of people who came to me to say things like, “Cátia, can I tell you something? I had breast cancer ten years ago, and I never talked to anyone except members of my family, and I would like to talk about it now.” The more you talk, the more it’s like a release for you. I feel better when I talk about it. The more you talk about it, the more support you have. If you don’t talk about it, people don’t know that you are going through something. And this is across everything, not only having cancer. I think the more transparent you are the more benefits you get in your life.
Live with no regrets
If you ask me, “Do you want to have babies again?” Or, “Would you have a baby knowing that you could trigger back cancer?” I would say yes. The cancer is part of my experience, and it makes me strong, to be honest with you — strong in my career, strong in my personal life, strong with my husband. Yesterday, my husband and I had a chat, and he said, “You had the worst year of your life last year, and you are having one of the best years now.”
Achieving balance
I was always a career-driven person. I didn’t think about maternity until I was 34 or 35, and I decided to have a baby. You need to have a really, really good partner, and I do. Everything is split between us, and he understands that I need sometimes to stay a bit late for meetings, or I need to get up a bit earlier for meetings. So we find a nice balance between us.
When I needed to travel when Noah was super, super young, I made the decision to take him with me. I dropped him in Lisbon with my mom, and then I picked him up and traveled again.
Normally, when you have a baby, you tend to readjust everything for the baby, which is not wise. The baby is a new thing coming into your life. You need to fit the baby into your life, not the other way around.
Chase your dream
I originally studied to be a pediatrician. Just because I was related to my mom, and she’s a doctor, I was like, “I want to be a doctor, too.” But that’s not what I really wanted to be, to be honest. I was always drawing stuff, and I was, like, this doesn’t make sense. That’s why I quit everything to study design, and I was super happy with that.
I want my son to be a creative person, so I chose a Montessori school for him. It’s a school driven by creativity. They make you learn things in a different way. I just don’t want to limit his creativity from the beginning. It doesn’t matter what you choose in your career. Even if you want to be a doctor or an engineer, you need to be creative.
Magenta is a publication of Huge.
