My name is Colette. I'm 43. I spent more than two decades in Sydney media and fashion
before moving to the Central Coast with my husband Joe, our son River, and our three dogs.
I've always had good hair — genuinely great hair, the kind hairdressers used to fight over. It was my thing. A good blow-dry could turn around a bad week. So when I tell you that hair was the first thing I thought about after my diagnosis, understand that it wasn't vanity. It was the part of me I reached for when everything else felt uncertain.
A few weeks into November 2025, I was on my exercise bike at home when I felt a pain in my right breast. I'd actually noticed a lump months earlier, in Bali, right before I came down with a brutal case of Dengue fever that wiped out the rest of the holiday. Between the fevers and the hallucinations, the lump slipped my mind completely. By the time I remembered, three weeks had passed.
I booked in for a screening. A friend got me into an ultrasound the next day instead of the usual three-week wait. Within minutes, a doctor was called into the room. A second mammogram followed. Then a CT, an MRI, a biopsy.
My husband Joe came with me for the results. The doctor spent the first fifteen minutes talking about their own career before finally, almost as an afterthought, asking whether we'd already seen the results. We hadn't. “Oh yes,” they said. “You have cancer.” That was it. That was how I found out.
Getting cancer for Christmas was not on my bingo card for the year.
The first specialist wanted to operate within three days: a double mastectomy, then six months of chemo and radiation, reconstruction to be discussed later. We left that appointment unsettled — not because we doubted the diagnosis, but because we wanted a say in how we faced it. A friend connected us with a new team at Prince of Wales Hospital, and the difference was immediate. They explained everything: the type of cancer, hormone positive, the growth rate, the size, the real options. For the first time, it felt less like a sentence and more like a plan.
Chemo was originally scheduled for the week of Christmas. All I could think about was my hair. It sounds ridiculous to admit, but it had carried me through every hard year of my life, and I wasn't ready to lose it without a fight. So I did the pragmatic thing: I went to my hairdresser and had it cut above my shoulders before treatment could take it from me first. Small control, in a season with almost none.
Eventually, after weighing every option with a team I trusted, I chose a double mastectomy. Genetic testing showed a higher risk of recurrence, and I wanted this to be a season of my life, not something that followed me forever. Surgery was booked for February 3rd, timed, somewhat begrudgingly, around the Christmas break. Pro tip: don't get cancer over the holidays. It complicates absolutely everything.
That left me with a lot of time to think, and one very specific question: what could I actually do to make myself feel human through this? Not brave, not inspiring. Just human. So I made a list. What I'd pack. What I'd need. What might make a hospital bed feel slightly less like a hospital bed.
A robe that didn't feel like a hospital gown. Slippers that felt like a hug. Pyjamas that opened at the front, because nurses need constant access and there is no dignity in fighting your own top at 2am. A heated eye mask. Silk everything, because my skin had never felt more sensitive. A phone charger with a cable long enough to reach without me having to move. Snacks that weren't hospital food. And nothing, not one thing I could find, that was actually designed to hold a surgical drain discreetly and comfortably against my body, so I could leave my room, or my house, without a bulb hanging visibly against my clothes.
That last one stuck with me the most. I could buy beautiful pyjamas. I could buy a robe soft enough to sleep in for a week. But there was nothing built specifically for the parts of recovery nobody talks about: the drains, the bulbs, the bags, the practical, undignified logistics of healing that no one prepares you for.
That gap is where Hotel Pócar started. Not as a business plan, but as a list I made from a hospital bed, for myself, because I couldn't find what I needed anywhere else.
If you're reading this from your own hospital bed, or packing a bag for someone who is —welcome. This is why we built what we built.