Raising Awareness (2) - Early Cancer Symptoms

I like to raise awareness of early cancer symptoms when I can.  Many of my friends in the Young Women's Ovarian Cancer Support Group (held the first Wednesday of every month at Maggie's Centre, West London) tell me that their GPs dismissed cancer as a diagnosis at first because we/they were "too young".  To that end, I subscribe to Macmillan Cancer Voices which is a very useful resource to find opportunities to help people working in the cancer field with research, or to join hospital or other focus-groups to help patients and carers.  

I volunteered to give a talk to a group of GPs in Bexley, as that is my original home borough.  I spoke to about 20 GPs and practice nurses and the feedback was great; they found it very useful to hear about things from a patient's perspective.
Curiously I also found it felt good to talk about things to a captive audience (!) and (maybe) make a small difference to future doctor/patient interactions in difficult circumstances.

Some of the feedback the session received:

Dear Kelly,

The South East London Cancer Network would like to thank you for taking part in the ‘Improving the Earlier Diagnosis of Cancer' event at Holiday Inn Bexley yesterday.  The event was well received and GPs really enjoyed listening to your journey.

Here are some of the delegates' comments:

'All brilliant, thank you!'

'Very good meeting.'

'All of it was valuable. Overall excellent.'

'Excellent event. Very informative and useful. Please keep doing it.'

'All presentations brilliant and very useful to bring patients.'

'Please continue with these meetings.'

Very satisfied.'

'Learnt a lot from patient's viewpoint'

June 23rd 2014, I arranged to meet a strange man in Whitechapel.  He told me to look out for "a bald man reading a Kindle, hopefully there aren't too many of me!"  I had offered to relate my experiences of being a cancer patient for some research being carried out by Macmillan, in order to improve the whole experience for other patients.  There are so many small things that could make you feel a lot less stressed, and that's before you think of the big improvements that could be made.  Hopefully some of my less fun experiences will be taken note of.

Macmillan at St. George's held a Health and Wellbeing meeting on 23rd Sept 2014 for people who are coming to the end of their cancer treatment.  I was pleased to be able to present my experiences, and we also had useful sessions with a dietician from the hospital, a physiotherapist and Patrick, a lovely hypnotherapist who I originally met on the Coping With Cancer Stress course.  He lead a very interesting hypnosis session, where we all decided that we had only had our eyes closed for about 5 mins but it turned out to be 20 mins. 

I ended my talk with a final motto, which my friend in France taught me recently; he swears that no Frenchman ever suffered from stress, so maybe we can all learn something from it.

"Doucement le matin, pas trop vite dans l’apres midi "–

Take it easy in the morning and not too fast in the afternoon.

Have a lovely weekend!