Audrey Guth remembers sitting outside of a treatment waiting area and watching a mother with her two-year-old climb all over her. The kid was tugging at a scarf that was concealing the woman’s baldness underneath from chemotherapy treatments.
“I could just see the angst in her face and I thought to myself, ‘Me or my friends are going to get breast cancer, that’s just the statistics,’ and it happened to be me,” she said. “What can I do to make sense of this really random act of unkindness? She could never think of ever having a nanny, because most people look at it as a luxury, but I also knew nannies who really wanted to give back to the community.”
A breast cancer survivor, Guth formed the Nanny Angel Network in 2009 — the year following her diagnosis — to ease the burden of moms going through chemo and help them recover by providing four hours of free weekly in-home care for their kids.
The network has supported hundreds of GTA families since 2009, providing more than 12,000 hours of service from 85 active volunteers who are professional childcare providers.
This is an excerpt from a feature in the Toronto Sun. To keep reading, view the full feature in the Toronto Sun here.