“I feel that keeping my doctor’s hat helped me in many ways,” she explained in a recent call from Zoom.
Bose is very well versed in medicine because she is only 14 weeks before qualifying as a doctor in the UK.
But in the past four months, it was not just cancer that prevented her from graduating in medicine, it was Covid-19.
Ongoing chemotherapy has so severely weakened her immune system that she is considered “clinically extremely vulnerable” – even a mild outbreak of coronavirus can be deadly.
Bose has been asked to protect herself, which means she has to stay at home as long as possible, leaving only for exercise or medical appointments – not to work in a hospital, which is what is necessary to complete her medical training.
“To feel that you have the skills, the knowledge, you can be an asset to these patients, it is difficult to feel that you are getting lost on the sides of the field,” she said.
There are about 200,000 doctors across the UK, according to the BMA. This means that thousands may not be able to work on the front lines during a national health crisis.
Before the pandemic, there was a need for some 15,000 additional doctors across the country, according to the Royal College of General Practitioners.
Many protective doctors have been relocated for video consultations or administrative work and Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) is using tens of thousands of retired health workers to fill the gaps and help deliver vaccines.
“The NHS welcomes every additional pair of safe clinical hands that we can obtain now,” said Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard, president of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges. “We, like almost every other healthcare system, have been under enormous pressure and our team is tired and many are exhausted.”
‘I felt really guilty’
Bose, a Canadian who has lived in the UK for five years, is a former teacher who decided to seek medicine after an almost deadly allergic reaction left her stunned and inspired by the doctors who treated her.
“I really admired this ability to maintain a sense of calm and purpose in really dangerous life-threatening situations,” she said.
After enrolling at St. George’s Medical School, University of London, in 2016, doctors at a hospital in the Czech Republic detected signs of osteosarcoma (a form of bone cancer) while she was completing a surgical internship two years later of your training.
His first seven-month fight against the disease – involving two surgeries, chronic pain and more than a year in a wheelchair or crutches – was delayed, but it did not hinder his goal.
When the pandemic struck last year, she saw some of her senior colleagues accelerate her training to join the effort as British hospitals filled with patients with Covid-19.
“During the first wave of the pandemic, I felt very, very guilty for not being able to help,” said Bose.
At the time, however, she thought it wouldn’t be long before she was trained and ready to intervene. But in October, she returned to the hospital with chest pains – “thinking, ‘Oh, I must have Covid,'” she recalled.
Instead, she found that her cancer had returned, this time spreading to the lining of her lungs in the form of hundreds of small tumors, most of which are so small that it is impossible to see in the images – or to remove.
“If you can’t remove it by surgery, you run out of options quickly, which is a pretty scary thing,” she said.
Osteosarcoma is the same type of cancer suffered by Terry Fox, whose “Marathon of Hope” in Canada on a prosthesis in 1980 made him a national hero. His journey across the country ended halfway when doctors discovered that the cancer had returned and spread to his lungs.
Fox died 10 months later. Since then, his foundation has raised more than $ 700 million ($ 549 million) for cancer research on his behalf.
Although Fox himself is among the most famous Canadians in history, the cancer he has had is one of the rarest and least known.
For Bose, it is incurable. She will have cancer and regular treatment for him as long as she lives. Your doctors don’t know how much time is left – one or 50 years.
“It probably won’t be 50 years, let’s be honest. But we can hope,” she said. “If I’m lucky enough to live more than a year, I want to spend it working, living and doing what I love. I don’t want to sit on the couch for two years and watch Netflix.”
There is a job at the NHS waiting for her, as long as she can finish training by August – a remote chance, she imagined by the end of January. That was when she took her first injection of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, giving her at least some protection against the coronavirus.
But training around the chemotherapy treatments that knock you down for weeks each month is extremely difficult.
Renewed hope
In mid-February, after his initial interview with CNN, Bose’s oncologist called with good news – approval to use a new drug, cabozantinib, which showed promising results in patients with his type of cancer in clinical trials.
It is not a cure, but his doctors are hopeful that the drug will keep his cancer under control for at least the next six months without chemotherapy, giving Bose enough time to finish school.
“When she told me, I started screaming – I was screaming, crying, laughing and smiling,” she said. “I’m only buying myself six months, but I can pack a lot in six months.”
Two weeks ago, having started the new treatment, Bose started his final 16 weeks of training. The first will be spent in a family doctor’s office in South London, then in a hospital. His oncologist thinks the vaccine gives him some level of protection, but Bose is still at a potentially fatal risk when deciding to work in a hospital during a pandemic.
“My life will never be risk-free,” she said. “No matter what I say, or what I want, or what I hope, my life is limited. This could be the last year of my life … I am willing to take that risk.”
Some suggested that she put her goals aside and spend time doing what she loves. Medicine, however, is just that.
“Every day, I want to wake up, love my job and feel like I went to work and helped someone and learned something and had meaning for my days,” she said.
“[If I’ve] I have a limited amount of time left, but I spend that time doing what I love with the people I love and working to achieve my goals and working for the sake of other people and helping patients, so this is a life worth living. be lived. ”