I am.
I am…
I am?
That is a difficult question, isn’t it? What am I? Who am I? What makes me me?
I can tell you that I am a doctor, a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend, a journalist, an author, a charity ambassador but those are all the things I do and the roles I play. I can say I am a hard worker, nosy (actually great for being a doctor, but we phrase it as interested in people), loyal, sometimes funny, probably also at other times irritating, but these are character traits. Who are you? At the very core of your being, what am I?
I don’t think I had ever really thought about it before I had cancer. If you would have asked me I would have replied either with one of the roles of character traits above or with how I felt at that exact moment in time, for example – what are you? I am cold, tired, happy, fed up. I was diagnosed with stage 2 bowel cancer at the age of 39 and started psychotherapy within a few months as a way of trying to help nurture and heal my mind while my body underwent treatment. My therapist asked me this very question one day and I could not answer. Who am I? If you strip away all the roles that I play? What am I?
I know some answers now.
I am determined and persistent.
I underwent major surgery in 2019 followed by six months of chemotherapy. Before the pandemic struck in the Spring of 2020 I was having scans to hopefully show that my treatment was finished. Only they did not and instead showed that I had further growths which needed to be monitored and then have exploratory surgery in May 2020 followed by an enormous surgery in September 2020. This involved fifteen days in hospital, ten of them in ICU, all in the middle of the pandemic, which meant without family and friends visiting. Through that, through all of it, I learnt that I can be relentless, relentless in my drive to keep going, to keep pushing through. That might mean getting up the day after major surgery (even if only for ten minutes to sit in a chair), it might mean sweating through the burn for months to get my fitness levels back post operatively or during chemotherapy. It might mean learning to eat again, re-establishing my relationship with my body time and time again and learning to trust it once again. It might mean keeping going, going to chemotherapy or appointments or scans when I didn’t want to, when I was furious or fed up, when I felt like rubbish. I learnt that you don’t need to go in skipping and laughing, you don’t need to be positive all the time, you simply go.
I am determined and persistent, and I will use those traits, to assist me in the goals and aims that I have had since I was a little girl dreaming of being a doctor, to help people. It may be a cliché, that I became a doctor to help people but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t true! And now my own experience with cancer makes me more determined than ever to raise cancer awareness and help those affected in whatever way I can.
By those of us affected by cancer, I mean all of us. After all, 1 in 2 of us are going to be diagnosed with cancer at some point in our lives, which means we all are going to know someone with it at some point. If you know your body, if you know what is normal for you, you are more likely to be able to identify if something changes and therefore when to see a doctor. So we must raise awareness of all cancers and their symptoms but also educate ourselves about our own bodies so we can recognise change and seek help appropriately. We must attend screening when it is offered so that we may pick up cancer at an early stage, or in the case of cervical screening before it even develops.
I am a doctor, I am interested in my patients and want them to have the best outcomes they can for their cancers and their health. I am a woman and desperately want to improve education for all women in order that they can take control of their bodies and their sexual health. I am a mother and want our children to be healthy, in all the ways that means, which most definitely includes prevention such as vaccinations and screening. I have been a cancer patient, I am a cancer survivor and I want as many of us who have been in my position to survive, or to live healthily as long as possible.
I am determined, I am persistent. I will use those traits to help as many people as I can in order to reach those goals.