'When You're at Your Most Vulnerable, Appearance Matters' ; Consultant Oncologist Hilary Thomas has Treated Cancer Patients for Years. But the One Thing She Had Never Prescribed, Until She Was Diagnosed with the Disease Herself, Was a Large Dose of Self-Esteem

Summary

---

Photographs Libi Pedder

Like most women with breast cancer, Hilary Thomas can remember with pin-sharp clarity the moment she first felt the lump. While washing herself in the bath, her fingers brushed against a dense, firm mound just underneath her right breast. 'I didn't like the feel of it. I immediately thought it was cancer,' she says. It is, one assumes, the natural and understandable reaction, but in her case it was also an informed one. Hilary is a professor of oncology. In the past two decades, she has treated countless women suffering from breast cancer.

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

'When You're at Your Most Vulnerable, Appearance Matters' ; Consultant Oncologist Hilary Thomas has Treated Cancer Patients for Years. But the One Thing She Had Never Prescribed, Until She Was Diagnosed with the Disease Herself, Was a Large Dose of Self-Esteem

This year, at the age of 46, she became one of them. 'People say to me, it's not fair, it shouldn't happen to you. And at the back of my mind, I suppose I did believe being an oncologist was an insurance policy,' she says, smiling wryly at her own illogical thought processes. 'But the reality is that it is a common disease, and I am just one of the statistics.'

Professor Thomas's pragmatic demeanour is everything you might expect in someone who has combined an exacting career with raising two daughters. As a consu...

See the full content of this document

---