In this CafeMom's series, Work It, Mama, powerful moms detail how they navigate their professions and home life.
Shortly after Jessie Cohen, who runs public relations firm Jessie Cohen PR & Consulting, arrived at the Sundance Film Festival in 2019, she got a call from her doctor's office regarding a lump in her breast. "I couldn't pick up, and the nurse left me a message and said, 'Call me back when you're sitting down,'" remembers Jessie. "The feeling left my body." When she called the nurse back, she was told she had breast cancer.
While in the shower just a few days earlier, Jessie felt a hard mass in her right breast. It was a mass she thought had been there for about a month. But since it hadn't gone away, it gave her pause. "'This is a little different,'" she remembers. "It didn't hurt." At the time, Jessie was breastfeeding her daughter. "I remember thinking, 'This must be a clogged duct,'" she adds. "But it was very distinct. It wasn't small. And I remember asking my husband, 'Do you feel this?' And he was like, 'Yeah, I feel that. You have to go to the doctor.'" That same day, she got the lump checked out. "They biopsied the mass, and they biopsied my lymph node, and then they bandaged me up, and I got on the airplane the next day."
While at Sundance, Jessie says she remembers "walking around Main Street, just going to press appointments, dealing with clients" after deciding to stay at the festival to work for a bit, despite the news she'd just received.
"It is amazing what we are capable of," she says of how she was able to remain focused. After returning home from Sundance, Jessie went right into "just a million different body scans appointments where they put illuminating drugs in my body so they could see if cancer had spread," she says. Nearly two weeks later, "I was in chemo," she continues, adding that she was diagnosed with "HER2-positive breast cancer."
Almost instantly, her perspective changed. "I used to subscribe to all of these things that we think we should be as working moms," says Jessie of her life pre-diagnosis. "I used to tailor going to get my f—ing hair blow out before every meeting, every event. Anytime I had anything, I was like, 'Oh, I've got to have straight hair like this for anyone to take me seriously or to look good.' And then [the doctors] were like, 'Well, you're going to lose your hair.'" Still, she kept grinding at work.
"All my hair fell out, and I showed up to meetings with like, no warning to people," says Jessie.
"I didn't know how to tell people. I didn't tell most, and I never shared on social media until I was through it over a year later. I realized quickly other people's projections interfered with my own ability to focus on getting through the thing. But I knew I was still going to try to keep working."
And she did. Her company, which represents contemporary artists like Genevieve Gaignard and Kennedy Yanko, and VR fitness app Supernatural, Gena Davis' Bentonville Film Festival, and the Old Skool Cafe, a nonprofit supper club in San Francisco run by at-risk youth, continued to thrive. After all, this is a mama who breastfed her daughter while working the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival.
"My career is my first baby," says Jessie.
“I put everything into it. It's totally me. My personality is all up in there. I love working with creatives who have somehow harnessed the power to do a thing.” When she started her business back in 2010, Jessie knew there would be hurdles. “I was always like, ‘This is going to be hard. I don't have health insurance. I don't have maternity leave but I still want this. So, let's do this.'”
Jessie will be the first to admit, though, that striking an even work/life balance takes constant effort. After fielding emails before getting her daughter ready for preschool, and just after sending her little one off with her dad, who does morning drop-off, Jessie usually jumps on her first call at 8 a.m. Throughout the day she’ll have meetings with her team and clients, and she’ll carve out time to be creative. “I have to schedule creative time or I'll end up in back-to-back meetings all day long with no actual work time," she says.
In the afternoon she pauses to pick her daughter up and then keeps working until about 6 p.m. “I stop and I go downstairs, and I make dinner and I try to show up and be mindful for my family because I also want that for myself,” she says. After her daughter goes to bed, Jessie is back at it — working until about 11 p.m. Jessie says her attitude toward most things can be summed up as: “I'm up for this challenge.”
But the effects of chemo were tough on Jessie.
"I was sick," she says. "I felt stoned all the time. I was on steroids. I looked like s—. I gained weight from the steroids. And my nails were falling off, and my eyebrows were going away."
Additionally, she was still trying to navigate being a new mom. "Imagine having this new, beautiful baby, and you're just trying to be all things as a mom, as a wife, and you're like, 'F—, I'm going to be out for a little while.'"
But she never lost hope.
"I would make this visualization of getting sucked into a black hole, and I would visualize myself tumbling through space like I was in a wave in the ocean or something. And I would think, 'But I'm going to get sucked out the other side.' I have got to get through this unknown. Because that's the only thing that I could control."
Focusing on action items helped Jessie cope mentally. "I knew I was going to show up and do the things," she says. Those things included acupuncture, Reiki hypnotherapy, talking with a therapist, and exercise. "I did every single thing I could do in addition to chemo," she says. "It was really ugly at times, and I was terrified. But I just put one foot in front of the other, even when it was super-duper painful, and hard. I'm so glad that I did that because now I'm on the other end."
While breast cancer is a big part of her life, Jessie says, "It's not my story."
But, she adds, “I also recognize, this is a thing in my life that I did, and it is important. But other things are more important. All of the other things in my life are more important than breast cancer. But breast cancer is the heaviest thing to ever happen to me. It is a constant reckoning with mortality. But I also think, 'I'm here living this, and I'm enjoying it.'
“I feel better than I ever did before. I don't know that it's because of cancer, but it's because of doing something that's really f—ing hard all the way. And just being like, 'OK, life is unpredictable and filled with moments where it's going to be dark, and you just have to make a decision.' Am I going to get up and go to the next day, to the next thing?"
"I don't know if there is any 'getting through it,'" says Jessie.
"It's more like fold it into the mix," she adds. "It's like you fold being a parent into the mix when you want to have your career. And it doesn't always feel good, and I do feel stressed out and spread very thin, like all business owners and parents do. But I also I'm here for it. This is my life on my terms."
