When taking a true history can heal patients… and their doctors
'When you train to be a health professional, you are systematically desensitised from thinking about the person as anything but a body.'
I was 11 when I fell, suddenly and irrevocably, into the medical system.
A fist-sized osteogenic sarcoma growing out the back of my left knee.
Common enough, as far as childhood cancers go, but ruinous in its effect, with impacts that are still felt (in the most literal sense) 25 years on.
Since that day, an expanding network of specialists, surgeons, physios and nurses have navigated their way across my body, some with gentle touches, some with breaking hammer blows.
