I Treated Breast Cancer for Years as a Doctor. Then I Was Diagnosed

Read more > I Treated Breast Cancer for Years as a Doctor. Then I Was Diagnosed

I WAS A CANCER EXPERT LONG BEFORE I WAS A PATIENT: in control and invulnerable. Yet all of that changed with one phone call. Seeing the familiar number from my university’s radiology department, I knew it would be a “finding of concern.” With a pang of sadness, I wondered which of my patients I would soon be calling with bad news.

But the bad news was about my recent mammogram. Nothing prepared me for the sickening sense of foreboding and fear that gripped me that day. At 48, I was not ready for breast cancer. For me, unlike most of my patients, the decisions about which treatments to choose were the easy parts. I never doubted that a double mastectomy was the right choice, since I had a strong family history of the disease. Yet as a woman, I still wrestled with the need for such a drastic step. When I thought it was all behind me, after almost a year of tests, frequent visits to the doctor’s office and multiple surgeries, I found out that I carried the BRCA gene. This inherited gene is likely going to affect other family members and made me worry about my 10-year-old daughter. The BRCA gene puts me at high risk for ovarian cancer, which meant I needed to remove my ovaries and fallopian tubes. The night before the surgery to remove y ovaries, I asked my friend and patient how it would feel to have my ovaries removed. She stared at me with bewilderment. “How can the thief of so many ovaries ask a question like this?” she asked. Although I could explain the surgery and its medical and emotional consequences, I had no idea how I would feel about losing more precious body parts and going into menopause overnight.

Doctors live in a world of statistics and probabilities, and we often use numbers to reassure patients. These numbers feel very different when it is your cancer. I knew there was already a 2%-3% chance of finding ovarian cancer during that surgery. As a doctor, I interpreted this to mean that there was a 97% chance of being cancer-free—something I thought should be reassuring to patients. Yet none of the favorable statistics let me rest until I got the call from the pathologist that I was cancer-free.

Read more > I Treated Breast Cancer for Years as a Doctor. Then I Was Diagnosed