Do what you love.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written. It’s not something that I tend to find make time for in the craziness that is day to day life. Although if I’m completely honest, the day-to-day is not all that crazy at the moment – well it is, and it isn’t. 

 In my everyday I am a healthcare professional and even as I typed that I giggled, and then repeated ‘I’m a professional’ in my best Ralph from The Simpsons voice. I have been a Radiation Therapist for the past 8 years now (man that sounds like ages when I put it down on paper) and still some days I laugh at the thought that someone thought I was competent enough to make decisions about someone’s life/cancer treatment, let alone be in charge of a machine or work area and the staff that come with it. Don’t get me wrong, I know I’m damn good at my job. It’s something, like so many others in my profession, I fell into by accident, having chosen the course at a whim, without really understanding what it entailed. But from my very first placement, I was in love (the same could not be said for half of my cohort, who dropped out of the course after the first placement – it’s not for everyone). 

If you asked me to pinpoint what exactly I love about what I do, I think it would boil down to three things: 

1) No two days are the same. The number of different things we see and do is sometimes mind-boggling. On any given day, I could be creating a thermoplastic mask for a head & neck patient after coaching them through their claustrophobia, performing CT scans, helping in MRI, tattooing patients, planning a lung patient and spending hours trying to get their heart dose under tolerance, doing quality assurance checks, in workshop pouring cerrobend cut-outs, making lead shielding, using power tools, peeling off a dressing to reveal a fungating breast lesion and packing the crevasse of that lesion with tissue-compensator to ensure an even dose, presenting a new process that we’ve implemented to our department, bladder scanning a prostate patient to see if their bladder is full enough for treatment, troubleshooting machine errors, troubleshooting set-up errors, navigating a machine breakdown, consoling a daughter who feels like she is not doing enough for her dad who has dementia and can’t keep still for treatment, matching on-board imaging and matching to millimetre accuracy – the list goes on, and this is still only a fraction of what we do. I’ve treated the soles of feet, the tops of scalps, and everything (I mean, everything – boobs, butts, vaginas, penises, fingers and big toes) in between. 

2) Because of the vast range of things we do, there is always room for growth. There will never be a day where I think I know it all, because there is so much to learn and we have an ever-evolving (scope of) practice. I’ve been in this gig for close to a decade now, and every day I learn something new – and sometimes it’s from someone who has been working a lot fewer years than I (as a proud and notoriously bossy Leo, I must admit it took me a while but I’ve grown accustomed to the taste of humble pie). And the wonderful thing – at least where I work – is that people are always encouraged and empowered to keep on learning, and to pass on the things that they have learned. 

3) The people. At the heart of it, I think this is why I we do what we do. When I tell people what I do for work I often get met with a shift in tone, a small frown, and the phrase ‘that must be so hard/sad.’ I guess I can see why people might think it would be – cancer centres are not places people usually go to by choice, and the people who leave our doors are more often than not, not the same people they were when they first came through them. But honestly, while yes, there are hard days and there are sad days, and times you wish you could do more, work is overall quite a positive place. Most of the patients have such great attitudes (whether or not that’s a facade, I couldn’t tell you – if there’s anything I’ve learnt from following @thecancerpatient on Instagram it’s that patients seem to internalise their fears and anxieties. Also, PCHP lol) and if they don’t, it’s understandable as to why. And there are few places in the hospital where practitioners get to see their patients pretty much every day, sometimes for up to 7-8 weeks – a time period which gives us a pretty unique opportunity to forge relationships that often feel like they dance on the line of friendship despite only being less than 20 minutes of interaction a day. It is a wonderful thing, to be able to share in such an important part of someone’s life. To hold their hand and assure them that they are not alone through this stage in their journey. To get a patient who is so sure they won’t be able to tolerate treatment, through their first, second, third…last treatment. To empower them with the knowledge on how the treatment works, and why exactly we do some of the things we do. To go into the room and tell a patient they have too much gas in their rectum and they need to do a big fart before we can continue (lol, always makes my day when a prim and proper gentleman lets out one so big you can taste it). 

While it’s lovely to be told that we can make what is a daunting experience less scary, and dare I say, relatively pleasant considering, the greatest compliment I feel like I have ever received is when a patient said that I made them feel like a person, not a number. It was a comment that left me simultaneously proud and a little bit sad that that was the first time they had felt that way about their care. While it may not be comfortable to point out, there is a stigma to being sick, and it is a fine line between what comes off as empathy and what comes off as pity. It is a struggle for both the giver and receiver; it is hard to give one, without the receiver feeling the undertones of the other. It’s not the same thing, but whenever I talk about my Mum’s suicide, I feel the same kind of discomfort (that’s a tale for another time). Anyway, it is another line we all dance on, but for me it was interesting to hear a patient’s perspective. For some disciplines, it may be hard to separate the patient from the person, but I suppose as radiotherapists, it is one of the lessons seeing patients on the daily affords us. And sometimes that humility (and a high standard of treatment and care) makes all the difference. 

I have rambled a lot and gone completely off-topic (not that I really started with a topic in mind), which is not something all that surprising to anyone who’s ever read my writing before. I certainly didn’t expect to spend my third day of annual leave gushing about how much I love my job (what a work nerd!) I can’t wrap this up without acknowledging though, that when I mentioned that it was ‘the people’ that made me love what I do, that I was also talking about my colleagues – not just RTs, but the doctors, nurses, physicists, the guys at the front desk, and the cleaners. It takes a special sort of person to be able to do what we do – I mentioned the high rate of dropout after my first placement – and those who persist through the hard/sad days are rewarded with a wonderful perspective on life. No matter how shitty or busy or hectic our day is; no matter how much of an ecosystem we’ve created underneath the layers of PPE (I personally, am a sweat machine), we have the luxury of being able to come to that place by choice, which is not something our patients people are afforded. It doesn’t make it any less tiring, and it doesn’t make the days any less long, but trust me, it doesn’t go unnoticed. I see you - they see you – and we are all so grateful for the hard work that you do. 

I say this all the time, but if I won the lotto today, I would still be at work tomorrow and every day I go to work feeling grateful to have the best job in the world. *dead lemming noise*