Four years ago this summer a 47-year-old artist living in Connemara went to hospital in Galway for the weekend. She didn't leave as soon as she had expected to. Jill Teck was told that she had acute leukaemia.
Her white blood cells were so low that she was put into isolation immediately.
"I couldn't even go out for a new nightdress, which I badly needed," she said.
After six months of intensive chemotherapy, she emerged with the sort of will to live which she had lacked before diagnosis.
Lawrence Le Shan, a US doctor and psychiatrist, who is author of Cancer As A Turning Point, has written that he found some 70-80 per cent of cancer patients to be in a state of despair with their lives before the illness took a grip. This was Jill Teck's own experience.
"My life had gradually disintegrated into a meaningless struggle although, ironically, right up to the time I went into hospital people were telling me how well I looked, and everyone, including myself, was taken in by the fact that I always seemed to be busy and well occupied with so many interests," she writes.
"I wasn't depressed in the ordinary sense. I didn't, for example, take the line that I couldn't cope.
"Had I done that, perhaps, instead of carrying on relentlessly, I might have got the respite I needed. Much in my life needed attention, including the stressful state of my marriage, but I closed my eyes to this and simply felt trapped and isolated.
"The feelings of isolation had been with me since I was young, and were accentuated by the fact that I had moved from Wales, rather against my will, and was now living in Connemara.
"I had made efforts to integrate with the community, but felt I had failed. Added to this was the fact that I had never liked myself much and assumed others felt the same."
Quite early on in her treatment at University College Hospital, Galway, she reached her own inner turning point. "My vivid imagination took me through my own death. I emerged with the decision that I did want to live. After all, there had been some doubt in my mind.
"From that time on I suppose I knew, in some obscure way, that I would survive."
When she returned home she began to paint. She produced five self-portraits, which were published with an account of her experience, Becoming the Tree (Auburn House, 1997). Adapted and directed by Ann Henning Jocelyn for the Connemara Theatre Company Ltd, it has had several stage presentations, most recently for medical staff from UCHG, St James's Hospital and Trinity College Dublin.
This Friday it will be on stage again as part of the Cuirt Literary Festival in the Town Hall Theatre Studio in Galway at 7 p.m. Admission is £5, and tickets can be booked by telephoning 091569777.