An excerpt from The Atlantic -
A Breast-Cancer Surgeon Returns to Work After Breast Cancer
Liz O’Riordan went from doctor to patient, and back again. Here’s what she learned on the way.
By ED YONG
Doctors face particular challenges when they become patients—challenges that they are rarely prepared for. It is hard to relinquish control and allow others to dictate the treatments that you yourself are used to doling out. It is crushing to know your own prognosis in the starkest terms—a 65 percent chance of surviving for 10 years, in O’Riordan’s case. It is awkward to see your own former patients while you’re being treated: To strike up a chat would break confidentiality.
And it is difficult to be cut off from the same supportive forums and networks that other patients use to share experiences and support; if you let slip that you’re a doctor, you become a source of information, rather than a comrade in illness. After getting her diagnosis, O’Riordan tweeted about it, and began blogging about her experiences. She was contacted privately by several people who said: I’m a doctor, and no one knows I have cancer. She ended up with a secret network of 15 such people. Two of them have since died.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/02/a-breast-cancer-surgeon-returns-to-work-after-breast-cancer/553199/
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