She was also grappling with self-worth and how the inability to have children would now form part of her identity. “As though your feminine attributes come from the potential to bear children. And once you can no longer do that … you’re not human anymore,” she observes.

“There’s no value in your mind that you’ve worked so hard to build. The personality that you’ve worked so hard to create. The love that you give is somehow not relevant because you can’t have kids.”

I spoke to several women about various health conditions. When health and vitality are compromised, there is no shortage of pain, anguish and loss. Traumatic childbirths, conflicted, compromised bodies, chronic illness and disability – all of them affect people differently, but there are similar threads in all of them. All of the women expressed vulnerability.

When we meet on a sunny afternoon in Canberra, Ginger retells her journey in a matter-of-fact manner, but there is an emotional edge. There is still some turbulence to negotiate. You don’t speak about dealing with cancer and nearly dying in hospital without feeling it again, somehow, in some way.

Ginger, who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at 30 when she was “literally the fittest and healthiest” she had been all her life, was confronted with a dilemma. She asked not what miracle cures and natural wellness could do for her. Rather, she worried: “Am I ‘biologically unfit’ now? In fact, am I meant to die?”

Ginger is in her 40s now, but she was single and child-free at the time of her illness. (She has since married and had kids.) Still, she worries about what sort of unfit genes she may pass on to future offspring. “My husband is a population geneticist and microbiologist by training, and he just won’t discuss it with me, he gets really upset.” He tells her that we have evolved; that science has evolved, and medical science is the reason she’s alive. Ginger is meant to be here.

Nevertheless, for Ginger, a social justice journalist with a fascination for Darwinism, her introspection into her own mortality and fitness was traumatic. She’s a left-winger and hates the idea that she could survive only with the help of big pharma. That made her angry. The idea of ‘survival of the fittest’ taunted her.

Ginger is used to interrogating things, to probing into the complexities of human experience, of what happens to us and why, and importantly, how we deal. She is reflective on how we tell stories, including those around illness. We have accepted tropes and they are generally the ways people can understand or talk about illness. She invokes The Wounded Storyteller, by Arthur W Frank.

“One of [these tropes], for example, is that you’re vulnerable and you’re weak. The other one is that you’re a hero and you’re fighting this brave battle,” says Ginger. “None of these stories fitted me. Obviously, at times I felt very weak and vulnerable, but mostly I just felt quite tough, and I wasn’t a brave hero or heroine fighting cancer, nor was I weak and vulnerable, I was something else.”

“You were you,” I offer.

“That’s right and I think that this is why it’s so hard to be a person with an illness because who in this universe fits those ridiculous tropes?”

Ginger’s objection to this casting taps into a similar observation by Louise – that stories can determine how we perceive illness and in the case of females, the effects of it on their female bodies.

Speaking to women dealing with illness, I detected a common thread of resilience, a desire to rework the narrative others might wish to tell. Louise tackled female subjugation through imagery of monsters; Ginger queried her biological fitness, and the archetypes framing discussion about it.

Ginger wanted to weave her own narrative. Following her full thyroidectomy, she made the unusual request of seeing her cancer cells. She thought it would be useful, helping her prepare to be “cut open” and, she admits, she wanted to see what cancer looks like, to look her bad cells “in the eye”.

Her pathologist obliged, showing her the cut-up cancerous thyroid on slides and placing them under a powerful microscope.

“It was amazing to see because normal, healthy animal cells are beautifully shaped and they have a very strong nucleus, and these were just nasty. They were long fingers that were all melded together and their nuclei were disgusting shapes, and I could see that they were sick.”

Ginger says it might sound strange, but it helped her. “I thought, ‘Good, OK, I can see what was wrong, and now I’m ready for the bit that fixes me’.”

Louise recognises the importance of narrative in her illness journey, too. She tells me that she not only prayed to Bona Dea, she also struck a deal. “I said, ‘Look, you get me through this, I’ll tell everybody about you. And I will get a tattoo of your symbol’.”

Bona Dea’s symbol is the snake, a frequent creature of global mythologies. It is a symbol that many find confronting, but its relevance lies in its ability to survive. To shed its skin and have new life.

Louise says she’s yet to get the tattoo, but I can picture how well it would suit her. A coiled creature with concealed power and the ability to prosper under the most difficult conditions.

And that promise to tell everyone about Bona Dea – that, at least, she has fulfilled.