Under the Knife by Liz O'Riordan

Author:Liz O'Riordan [Liz O’Riordan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781800182424
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2023-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Starting the fellowship was bittersweet. I was excited to spend a year learning from some of the best surgeons in the country but having to leave Dermot the week before our wedding and spend the next year living apart was hard to do. His parents were lovely and at least I was living with people I knew. Some of the other fellows weren’t as lucky. The fellowship came with a fifty per cent pay cut because there was no on-call. Commuting and renting weren’t cheap. It was the sacrifice we all made to become a better surgeon.

The first week was a blur as I made my way around the maze that was the Marsden introducing myself to the breast and plastic surgeons. I had the luxury of being able to pick which clinics and lists I went to and there were a lot to choose from. It was going to take some time to work out how to fit everything in but I had the small matter of getting married first.

The ceremony was in an ancient church on the Norfolk coast followed by a reception in the small hotel where Dermot had taken me for our first weekend away together. We’d secretly been having dance lessons to surprise our guests when the band played our song, and I couldn’t have wished for a more perfect day. Dermot had planned the honeymoon. All I knew was that I needed to pack for sunshine, snow and everything in between. I had no idea where we were going. The first flight was with Iberian Airlines and I briefly thought he was taking me to Ibiza, but then we flew out of Madrid into Buenos Aires and spent three wonderful weeks touring Argentina, Brazil and Chile. I didn’t want it to end.

Back at the Marsden, I found out that I wasn’t the first O’Riordan to work for Louise, the senior breast surgeon. Dermot had been her registrar many years ago. It was a privilege to watch her work. Her clinics were often full of women who’d come for second and third opinions clutching copies of scientific papers they’d found online, desperate for someone to tell them what they wanted to hear. Sadly, they rarely heard it. Breast surgery is practised according to guidelines based on trials involving hundreds of thousands of women over many years. It’s unusual for anyone to practise outside these guidelines.

One morning we saw a woman in her forties for her third opinion who had been diagnosed with cancer six months before. So far she’d turned down every treatment. Her GP was hoping that Louise could persuade her to have surgery. The small cancer found at diagnosis was now taking up most of her breast and I could feel a mass of hard, enlarged lymph nodes in her armpit that were clinically ‘involved’. It’s another way of saying that the nodes are cancerous. Louise sat down next to her and asked, ‘Why you don’t want to have surgery?’

‘I don’t need it,’ she said.

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