OCT 18 — She was wearing a silver animal pendant. One of those simple but obviously expensive affairs. It sat casually around her neck and it matched her earrings. And she was also wearing a blue cardigan.
I had the same cardigan. I was reflecting on this, thinking about how I had never noticed that the buttons on the sleeve were square shaped, when my eyes focused on what I was reading in her clinical notes.
Stage T3, adenocarcinoma, confirmation, tumour, metastasis, lymph node involvement…
As a medical student you spend years learning about cancer. You learn about how they stage it, how it is found, how it spreads, how to cure it, what it looks like under the microscope, and how it kills.
But all the knowledge in the world will never take away that feeling you get when you see the terror in someone’s eyes as the news about their disease is being broken to them. It feels like a part of your life force has been sucked away from you. Medical professionals have to deal with these things all the time. And part of the skill exists in hanging on to that life force, even as the people around you are falling apart.
The consultant and I shared a glance. We both knew what was going to happen.
She just stared at us incomprehensively as we broke the news. Then her fingers twisted the buttons on the sleeve of her cardigan, and the animal pendant oscillated on its string as she bent over and started sobbing.
After she calmed down a little, she and her husband asked us how it could have happened. This woman was a good cook. She had a balanced diet, did regular exercise, never smoked a day in her life, and drank minimally. She was someone’s grandmother, someone’s wife, someone’s mother, someone’s daughter. It wasn’t fair. But it was happening.
The fact is, we don’t yet know all the reasons why people develop cancer. We know of some things that increase your risk of getting it, such as smoking, alcohol consumption, and an unhealthy diet. We know that there are some genes and underlying medical conditions that predispose you to getting cancer, but we don’t know exactly how each of these work.
In a fairer world, the people who keep good diets, do regular exercise and avoid risk factors such as smoking and drinking alcohol would never get cancer. But this isn’t a fair world. There are other factors, out of our control, that govern our individual risks.
Therefore you must be thinking — if all the exercise and healthy food in the world isn’t going to decrease my chance of getting cancer, then why bother with any of it?
The next question they wanted to ask was if she had any hope of surviving.
At this point, the consultant told them that her condition was very serious, and nobody had the answer for whether or not she would survive. But what we did know was that having a good fitness level would help her better tolerate the drastic treatments that she would next undergo, and help her body fight the cancer as hard as it could.
While it is general knowledge that a balanced diet and regular exercise are good for you, a lot of people put it off, making excuses about busy schedules and financial constraints that prevent them from leading a healthier life — and when the time that something comes along that will test their bodies, they may not be prepared.
This is not a scientific article, and it does not aim to give false hopes or scare you. In essence, all I am trying to say is this: anyone can get cancer, and this is out of our control. But people with a better fitness level can cope better with the treatment, and are better candidates for treatment as well.
So start improving your fitness levels today, not only to prepare yourself for the possibility that an illness may one day come knocking at your door, but also to improve your overall health and wellness normally and make you feel good about yourself.
* Angeline Lee is a medical undergraduate at the University of Bristol.
* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.
