Lorraine‘s Dr Anisha Patel has admitted she is “grateful” when she wakes up some days over five years on from her battle with bowel cancer. The mum of two was diagnosed with stage 3 bowel cancer at the age of just 39. She has been in remission for the past five and a half years but admits she is still in “a lot of pain” many days.
Despite this, she continues to work to wipe away the stigmas attached to cancer diagnosis and treatment. “I think when I was diagnosed, none of my friends really had experienced cancer at that time. And I think one of the things that I felt as a doctor was that I had to somehow use that unique perspective I had as a patient and adopted to try and do good with this,” she intimates.
“I was approached by a publisher to write a book which basically documented the highs and lows of cancer but also what a struggle it was. Life after cancer is something I think people often don’t talk about, but life after cancer is hard and when you’re getting diagnosed at a young age, it’s a really lonely place to be.”
Highs aren’t normally something you’d associate with cancer but Dr Patel explained further. “What I didn’t realise until I wrote my book, is that I’ve actually gone through what’s called Post Traumatic Growth when you get these new rose-tinted glasses where you have this [new] perspective.
“It’s very different [for everyone] and actually for me, often highs were as small as if I got out of bed after being wiped out from chemo for a week and went to the gym. Or I went to a restaurant with my friends and managed to eat a meal without leaving to go to the toilet 400 times because of my surgery.
“Or I ran a London Marathon two and a half years after finishing treatment when actually I have got terrible side effects from my treatment that might stop me from doing that.
“It’s everything from the little things where actually I’m grateful when I wake up some days even now when I’m in pain because I still have pain lots of days.
“And I think you know, those are the wins because when you hit rock bottom, I think you remember that and you know that anything above that is definitely a win,” she said.
Her book Everything You’d Hoped You’d Never Need to Know About Bowel Cancer became a bestseller and since her remission Dr Patel has made regular appearances on Lorraine and in other media to highlight the health issues she’s passionate about.
Dr Patel admits she felt “vulnerable” as a patient and says she “found the loss of control as a doctor the most difficult thing about going through cancer treatment.” Asked if she advocated for herself she confessed it only happeed a couple of times “but just that I was asking the question, ‘could we do things like this or how would that impact treatment?’ So just ask questions. I always encourage patients absolutely 100% to ask questions,” she said.
Asked how someone without her medical knowledge can best ensure that they ask the right questions and point doctors in the right direction during their consultations, which are often only minutes long she advises: “I think we need to almost have a plan where consultation time is used more efficiently.
“So sometimes we see patients who have got a cacophony of symptoms and can’t quite tease out what the most important thing to them is. What I say to patients is sometimes it’s easy to just write it out. Write out what’s the problem, the main problem, how it’s affecting your life, how it’s affecting you, what your expectation is, so that we get a clear outline of what your symptoms are from the offset. So if we know those, from the offset for the patient, we can actually get a lot more done in the consultation.
“Like knowing when your last period was if you are coming in for anything gynae. Otherwise, we sometimes spend a couple of minutes looking for the last period day. Or knowing exactly how many times you had a migraine in the last month. Keep a diary of symptoms. That’s really really helpful information. And it can make us assess quite quickly what’s actually going on.”
Everything You’d Hoped You’d Never Need to Know About Bowel Cancer – a doctor’s very personal guide to navigating through the sh*t and beyond by Dr Anisha Patel is available to buy from Amazon.
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