Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Dr Ben Bravery, Hachette Australia, $32.99.
Inconceivable, but credible. This is an authoritative and inspirational memoir about how one man’s cancer diagnosis led him to become a doctor and an advocate for change in the Australian healthcare system.
At the outset Dr Bravery points out this is not your typical cancer memoir. He also goes on to explain: even though there’s a lot about cancer in this book, but what “I really want to share with you is what happened after I got cancer.”
That was when he was a zoologist living in China, working for scientists. Now, he lives in Australia and practises medicine as a doctor. Aged 28, with his Beijing-based science communications business doing well and a new relationship blossoming, Ben woke from a colonoscopy to be told he had stage 3 colorectal cancer.
The leap from zoologist to cancer patient was not his choice but the leap from cancer patient to doctor was. That decision – what it’s like on both sides of the hospital curtain, and how medicine can be made better for patients and doctors – is the point of this book.
Ben wanted to become a doctor, to help people (like he had been) and to make the health system better along the way. Far from sounding selfish, he remembers “noticing lots of stuff that needs fixing in healthcare.” He goes on to list them, and some are anything but trivial.
Ben went into medicine older than most, after a career spent thinking about ecosystems and because of serious illness – this gives him a unique view. He approaches medicine as an outsider, though he possesses insider knowledge. Even though there are no tumours now, it was cancer that changed him forever. “I feel neither well nor unwell, not fully a doctor nor fully a patient.”
Dr Bravery’s cancer diagnosis led to a quest to put the heart back into healthcare.
