“ W ould it not be weird if I didn’t have breasts?” Dr Lakshmi Radhakrishnan was pleased when a patient asked her this question earlier th...
“Would it not be weird if I didn’t have breasts?”
Dr Lakshmi Radhakrishnan was pleased when a patient asked her this question earlier this year. It was the first time she had been asked it since she started working at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi, in January 2021. Radhakrishnan is pursuing an MCh, a super-specialisation postgraduate degree in surgery, focusing on breast and endocrine surgery, and the patient in question had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Very few of Radhakrishnan’s earlier patients had initiated a conversation about their future beyond their treatment for cancer.
It was a familiar problem. Throughout Radhakrishnan’s senior residency, at Thrissur Government Medical College, Kerala, she did not come across a single patient who returned for breast reconstruction surgery after undergoing a mastectomy, an operation to remove a breast. This despite the fact that breast cancer is the most common kind of cancer in the country today. “On days that I had duty, at least one case out of three to five cases we saw was a breast cancer case,” Radhakrishnan recalled. Many of these patients were under the age of 40.
“Women usually never bring it up,” Radhakrishnan said. “So when someone initiates the conversation, it feels very good,...
