C stands for cancer

Abstract

Last year I read the editorial of The Synapse Journal, ‘C stands for Cancer … Colleagues … Compassion.’ This has motivated me to narrate my personal experience … All doctors from time to time deal with harrowing stories of patients being struck with serious illness and cancer. Like many, I had coped with these experiences during my thirty three years as a family doctor by adopting a firm belief that it could never happen to me. Unsurprising then, my sense of shock when, a few months ago late in the afternoon I received the results of my second prostate biopsy. If I am totally honest, I knew what was coming as I have a strong family history of prostate cancer. Initially the MRI scan had left me with some hope as the report read ‘a suspicious lesion’ and a follow-up was suggested. So I had clung to the slim hope it was just a big scare. I was still in denial that it can happen to me and hoped that although it could happen it was not now but at some later stage in life.