THIS LIFE: Christine Tulloch was diagnosed with breast cancer three years ago and is the inspiration behind Booby Birds, a fundraising skydive team for women

I am still living with cancer. I think a lot of people assume you either have breast cancer or you haven't, but there are so many women out there who live with it. It's not something generally that, boom, you either get rid of or you're dead within six months. A lot of women live with it and it affects your entire life: physically but mentally, emotionally and financially.

My own diagnosis came in February 2004. It had been a busy and quite stressful year. The advertising company at which I had been a director went bust. All of a sudden I noticed my left breast had got bigger. If there's one thing I'd like to shriek from the rooftops it's that it can be any change in your breast, anything at all. I had had a B-cup all my life and all of a sudden I was a C-cup and I was thinking, hey, this is fantastic. But it was just the left breast and at the back of my mind I thought this is not right. I think I left it too late, a good six months before I went to the doctor.

Because I had two tumours and they were so big, they couldn't operate immediately, and I went into chemotherapy then had a month's grace before surgery because my immune system was shot to pieces. I had a mastectomy and they removed lymph glands, which means that my left arm is swollen now with lymphoedema. Then I had six weeks of radiotherapy. By January 2005 I was rediagnosed. It had come back.

I wouldn't want anyone ever to go through those first few weeks. Often when people have an accident, they have a momentary out-of-body experience, but I had this for a month. I didn't know what to do. That first night I couldn't sleep in my bed. I had to sleep in my daughter's bed with her.

My life is fairly normal now. I get up, I walk to my work at the Scottish Executive. The walk is part of my health regime, 2.2 miles. I started working again a year past autumn - I don't have a partner or anyone who can support me, so I support myself, always have done.

Once every three weeks I have to go to hospital for drug treatment. It takes a morning because they have problems finding my veins now. I have 90 minutes of Herceptin then half an hour of Omnitarg. I was only the second person in the UK to be on this combination.

It's a hackneyed phrase, but, when you have an illness like this, you get to know who your friends are. You lose some friends, but you also get new friends too. Tina Korup who has set up Booby Birds, a tandem skydive this September to raise money for breast cancer charities, is a friend. The dive she is organising is the ultimate act of empathy. She saw me going through chemotherapy, which hit me very hard, and I know she wanted to help me. She used to come round every Tuesday with a meal after I'd had my infusion, and sit with me. But I think she felt frustrated because the only real way of understanding what somebody is going through is if you have faced the same thing. She said to me something like, I want to feel that sense of fear of dying so that I can show you support.' So, she set up Booby Birds, and now there is a group of women jumping out of a plane to raise money for cancer. I'm not doing the Booby Birds jump. I have enough fear in my life.

I constantly face fear. It's not something which goes away. When you are living with cancer you're aware of the fact that it can and will progress at some point. You just don't know at what rate and you don't know how it's going to manifest itself. Every time you have a scan, for instance, there is a real fear. You worry yourself sick.

In Scotland a woman dies every seven hours of breast cancer. I'm pretty convinced that there's something going on in the air or in our food. I am careful about my diet now. I'm not fully vegan but I am veering towards that. And that's one of the things that helped me to start coming through the fear. I decided I needed to find out as much as possible to try to help myself and I spent a month doing things like going to meditation classes and going to Maggie's centre. You name it I tried it. Not just because I felt I needed to find what was right for me, but because all of a sudden I was no longer in control of anything. I discovered I was perhaps a bit of a control freak.

When you have cancer, it changes everything: your approach, your view on life. I'm a different person. One of the challenges is trying to find out who that new you is. I lost the Christine Tulloch I knew. I also couldn't find the new me. It's very scary. You physically change, you lose your hair, you get fatter because of the steroids and the chemotherapy. Mentally, chemo affects your brain, so you can't remember things. You look at what your priorities were beforehand, and you know, once you look at your mortality, there are other things you want from life.

The Booby Birds are having a fundraising dinner on August 31 at the Paramount Carlton Hotel, Edinburgh. For tickets call 0131 554 6791 or email jennifer@indigo pr.com. For more information go to www.boobybirds.co.uk INTERVIEW: VICKY ALLAN PORTRAIT: JEREMY STOCKTON