Finding Salvation In Hard Work.(Turning Points)(a mother's experience with losing a child)

Byline: Nicola Horlick; Horlick Is Ceo Of Bramdean Asset Management Llp.

Nothing can prepare you for losing a child. But focusing on work and family can help you survive.

My oldest daughter, Georgie, got leukemia when she was 2. It had never occurred to me that I would become the mother of a sick child. Georgie had been born healthy, with all her fingers and toes, and was big, bouncy and gorgeous. But when I was 28, I suddenly found myself spending a lot of time in the hospital with her. At the time I worked at the asset-management arm of S.G. Warburg & Co., which was then the leading investment bank in the City of London. I was spending much of my time with Georgie attending to her care, since my first concern was to get her better. But Warburg made me a director anyway in 1988.

When we first found out about Georgie's leukemia, I thought it meant certain death. Then I began to realize that the cure rates were pretty high. At the end of 1989, she'd been in intensive treatment for nine weeks, which I spent at her side. When she finally went to nursery school, I thought I should be the one to fetch her home. The first day, I was at the door waiting for her when she came out and said, "Why aren't you at work, Mummy?" Remember, this was a 3-year-old! I said, "Well, darling, I thought I should collect you." And she said, "Oh, no. I'm very happy if you stay at work."

We quickly got back into our normal routine, and I found it very helpful to go back to work at Warburg. Children with leukemia have to have constant blood tests, as there is always the fear that the disease will return. I was IV-trained, so I used to take the blood out of Georgie's line at breakfast and then drop it at the lab at the hospital on my way to work. All morning, I would trade in the stock market for my clients, but I would also be on tenterhooks waiting for the results, which wouldn't come through until lunchtime. Then I would breathe a sigh of relief and it would be OK for another week. Had I been sitting at home, I would have dwelled on it the whole time. Still, I never knew when I was going to disappear from the office. If Georgie's counts were low and she had an infection, we would have to go back to the hospital for a week of IV antibiotics. I had to build a structure around myself at work so that everybody knew who was doing what if I left suddenly.

In the middle of all that, I went off to run a different business, Morgan ...