Most of us are blissfully ignorant when it comes to interpreting fuzzy images on a screen when we go for a scan or ultrasound. It is up to the doctors to tell us the good or bad news. For GP Dr Philippa Kaye, her medical knowledge meant that she knew immediately her colonoscopy revealed cancer.
At 39, Kaye was very young to be diagnosed with colorectal cancer — the NHS routinely sends out home-testing kits for those aged 60 and over, as most patients are in this category. She feels lucky that the cancer was spotted in time. Luck, however, is not the word that first springs to mind on reading the book she has written, detailing her experience from first diagnosis to recovery. Doctors Get Cancer Too is an honest and very personal diary in which her scans, surgeries and side-effects from chemotherapy are recorded in graphic detail.
By the end of the book, the reader is intimately acquainted with the workings of Kaye’s bowel as she takes us on a journey through her cancer treatment, offering plenty of practical advice (plus a useful glossary of medical terminology) along the way. It is not without humour: anyone who has endured the indignities of a colonoscopy will know the unfortunate effects of having to drink “bowel prep” beforehand, or as she describes it, “hosing Armageddon from my behind”.
Now happily cancer free, she will still need regular scans to check she remains that way. Through genetic testing, Kaye found out that a genetic mutation doubled her risk of contracting bowel cancer (two in 10,000 instead of one in 10,000 for her age at the time in diagnosis — still really small), but she doesn’t blame her genes. She doesn’t blame anything.
“People ask all the time, ‘Do you ask “why me?”’ and my answer is ‘Why not me, someone has to have it’. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I have a healthy weight, I am not sedentary. Sometimes things just happen,” says Kaye.
One of the lasting effects is that the experience has changed her professionally. “It’s made me a very different doctor. I think when you go through a major life event it changes you in some way. I now know what it is truly like to sit in the patient’s chair and by that I mean that doctors are very much, ‘take a history, do an examination, work out what investigations you need and what the management is’ but that doesn’t really take into consideration the impact it is having on that person’s life.
“Cancer is really lonely. No matter how many people you are surrounded by, you do it all on your own: you’re the one having the chemotherapy, you’re the one having the surgery and friends and loved ones are with you but they hurt too. The biggest thing a doctor ever did for me was in my first surgery, in night four or five when things weren’t going well in ITU [Intensive Care Unit] and he sat on my bed and he held my hand and said, ‘You’re having a really tough time’ and at that moment I didn’t feel I was on my own any more.
“When I can see that my patients are struggling or maybe when they are tearful or when they are telling me how hard it is, I say ‘that’s really tough’. Just allowing someone to say that and acknowledging that can really help. The other thing that does help is to be able to say, ‘I know, I’ve done what you are doing, I know how hard it is and therefore I know how brave you are being and how strong you are’, so I think it has made a huge difference in how I am a doctor.”
Did she turn to religion in her darkest times? Kaye, a member of Mill Hill United Synagogue, says: “You do find yourself beginning to think about God in a different way and I had an unshakeable faith the whole way through that I was going to come out of it. Did I talk to God about it? No, I don’t think so, but the little things that I do which are based around religion and spirituality — for example, when I light my Shabbat candles — that is my moment of communion, be that with God or whatever God is to you, and my mantra is always “happy, healthy, safe” — may my kids be happy, healthy, safe. When you are sitting in a synagogue, for example, on Rosh Hashanah and you are surrounded by people, there’s power in the singing, there’s power in that group emotion and that allows you to feel you own emotions too. I had discussions in my own head that I had never had before, in a way.
“I had my last surgery on Rosh Hashanah [in 2020] and there was some part of me thinking, I understand that I have to do this, I understand that you can do anything to save life but I feel like I shouldn’t be doing it. But I came out of intensive care on Yom Kippur and that also felt really special, that felt OK, I’m in the right book now.”
That last surgery was particularly difficult because Covid meant severe visiting restrictions. “Doing it in a pandemic is really lonely. Waking up and knowing you are going to be on your own. Intensive care nurses are amazing but it is not the same as your husband stroking your hair or your mum sitting by your bed and that has been the biggest impact for me, essentially doing it on your own.”
Kaye initially wrote the book for herself, without thought of publication. “I couldn’t help myself. I write books as part of my job. It was a way of putting some order to the chaos and a way to try to process what was going on. Now when I look back and I think about the question ‘Why me?’ maybe the answer is because I can use that to help other people going through this kind of thing.”
Doctors Get Cancer Too, A Doctor’s Diary of Life and Recovery From Cancer by Dr Philippa Kaye is published by Summersdale Publishers at £9.99
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