CANCER WAS JUST A JOB until it happened to me

Author, speaker and health content creator Dr Liz O'Riordan shares her journey from consultant breast surgeon to cancer patient

- ELLA DOVE

Working as a consultant breast surgeon, it was my responsibility to tell around 10 women a week that they had cancer. It was an emotionally intense job and could feel like you’re being paid to break women. As a clinician, you have to develop a sense of detachment, otherwise you’ll crumble, but this wasn’t always easy. Sometimes, particularly after seeing young women, I’d cry in the toilets. There’s no counselling and very little training for breaking bad news. It’s just part of the job – until it happens to you.

In 2015, aged 40, I found a lump. Despite my job, I never regularly checked my breasts, a fact that seems crazy now, but I simply assumed that it wasn’t going to happen to me. In the past, I’d had two cysts that were benign and a normal mammogram nine months earlier. Still, I decided to get checked just to be safe. I didn’t want my team at work to see me, so I went to a different hospital. When I saw the results of my ultrasound on the screen, I knew before I was told that it was cancer.

When I was told the news, I realised how unhelpful the phrases that clinicians use were, such as ‘it’s just a small cancer’ or ‘it’s a good one to have, as there are so many options’. No cancer is good. No one is lucky to have it.

A week later, I was having chemotherapy for a stage three breast cancer. I had gone from clinician to patient – and I was terrified. In this case, knowledge was not power: I knew too much. My brain was full of information that I wished I could forget.

I was a terrible patient during chemo. I sat at home and suffered, crying in pain instead of asking for help. As a doctor, I felt I should know how to treat my own side effects, which included flulike aching, constipation, dry, cracked skin and indigestion. My mum and my husband, Dermot, also a surgeon, were wonderfully supportive, but allowing other people to help me was difficult.