At the hospital, Sarah began her treatment. Ignoring the oncologist’s advice, she refused to take days off work. If she was absent, if she abandoned her post, she left an empty space – it was too risky. She must hold on, every step of the way. She found the strength to get up every morning and make it in to work. She would not let the cancer rob her of the thing she had built up over so many years. She would fight tooth and nail to keep her empire. That thought alone kept her on her feet, gave her the strength, the guts, the energy she needed.

But the oncologist had warned her – the treatment would be hard going, and the side effects even worse. He had given her an exhaustive list, in a spreadsheet, detailing the precise moment when she would feel nauseous, what would happen to her hair, her nails, her eyebrows, her skin, her hands, her feet. What lay in store, day after day, during the months of her treatment. Sarah had left his consulting room with a stack of prescriptions to counter everything on the list.

What he hadn’t told her, what no one had mentioned, was the side effect that was more unpleasant than even the sore, swollen hands and feet, worse than the nausea or the fog that sometimes shrouded her brain. The side effect that she had been unprepared for, from which no prescription could offer relief: the isolation that went hand-in-hand with the disease itself, the slow, painful setting-aside that she was now experiencing.

At first, Sarah didn’t want to put a name to what was happening at work. She preferred to ignore the things her colleagues had ‘forgotten’, the new indifference in Johnson’s eyes. Not indifference, exactly, that was the wrong word, but a kind of distance, a curious cooling of their relations.

It took several weeks of appointments to which she had not been called, meetings to which she had not been invited, cases that had not been passed to her, before she was convinced: she was being pushed out.

The cruel, painful process had a name that she found it hard to contemplate: discrimination. A term she had heard in court a hundred times, but which had never before applied to her. Yet she knew the definition of it by heart:

Discrimination may be described as a distinction, whether intentional or not but based on grounds relating to personal characteristics of the individual or group, which has the effect of imposing burdens, obligations, or disadvantages on such individual or group not imposed upon others …

The term applied to behaviour which would be considered discriminatory under the Human Rights Code, including humiliating, offending or demeaning a person or group of persons on the basis of race, colour, ancestry, place of origin, political belief, religion, family status, marital status, physical or mental disability, age, sex, sexual orientation or conviction for a criminal offence unrelated to employment.