Kalgoorlie-Boulder lawyer and author Lisa Ellery has reminded women of Kalgoorlie-Boulder they don’t need to get hit by a bus to take a break.

The breast cancer survivor also urged guests at last week’s Women’s Leadership Forum to get regular mammograms and gift themselves the opportunity to potentially save their lives.

Ms Ellery addressed the crowd at the Kalgoorlie-Boulder Chamber of Commerce and Industry event and said she had loved running her law firm for 15 years, but it was a lot of work.

“The demand for my services was relentless, and I wanted my staff to have work-life balance, so I tried to take up the slack so that they didn’t have to,” she said.

“I felt compelled to work harder and longer, just keep going, telling myself that if I could work another weekend, I’d get on top of my workload and I’d never let it get out of control again.

“Any reprieve was short-lived, of course, because the work just kept piling in.

“The only time I didn’t feel it was when I was actually at work, because the work literally distracted me from the stress of work.”

Ms Ellery told the crowd she often indulged in the “hit by a bus fantasy”.

“An excuse to rest for a few days, which people would accept without argument,” she said.

The author of two crime novels said she used to think she didn’t have a hobby.

“Weirdly, it didn’t occur to me that the compulsion I’d felt since I was a child to write fiction could be considered a hobby,” she said.

“To start with, it was a secret . . . maybe I was embarrassed for anyone to see my early efforts because I felt they weren’t good enough, or maybe I felt that it didn’t fit with the reputation that I was trying to build for myself as a lawyer.

“But in secret, I kept writing, and I kept improving. Very occasionally, I would take a week off work and write non-stop.”

She said her first novel, Private Prosecution, simply “wrote itself”.

“The legal stuff, which you might think would be the tricky bit, just flowed out of me. It was the easy part,” she said.

“I was still working seven days a week when the book . . . was published on the first of September.”

In 2021, Ms Ellery was diagnosed with breast cancer five months before Private Prosecution was due to be published.

“I suppose I always knew that stress wasn’t good for me, but I worried more about the mental consequences than the physical ones,” she said.

Ms Ellery sold her law practice to ease her stress and continue her pursuit of writing and said it was “very emotional”.

“I let that thought in for the very first time. The thought that maybe I could stop,” she said.

“I could let go of a successful career I had worked so hard to establish, but was trying to kill me, in favour of a new career.”

Ms Ellery implored the crowd to get regular mammograms.

“Don’t worry that a mammogram might show up cancer — if it does, you’ve been gifted an opportunity to save your life,” she said.

“Mammograms are one thing, but maybe in your heart you suspect you might need to do things differently in your life.

“If this is you, don’t stand around waiting for a bus that might give you some time off, but could just as easily kill you.”