My honest note to hospital staff changed everything—combining healing for body and mind

Shadow of my former self

For years before my cancer diagnosis, I had worked and published research as a movement psychotherapist in a hospice running an expressive movement therapy group. It was there that I discovered how illness affects our sense of identity and mental health. I remember one lady whose lost mobility meant she couldn’t buy food and cook, a fundamental part of who she was. And a man with arthritis who was grieving the loss of his capable, sporty self.1

Like them, I too felt a sense of loss and became depressed when fatigue from my cancer treatment prevented me from working, dancing, and doing things that defined my identity as the spirited, social person I had always been.2

As my treatment compromised what I could do in my life, it changed how I felt about myself and how I felt seen by others. Being ill made me feel vulnerable and “in pain”—not just physically, but socially and psychologically too.

Yet here I was facing more treatment, this time for my other breast. Although the staff I met seemed kind, I was cut with terrifying “biopsies” and attended appointments where my breast was discussed as an object for dissection. Whenever I was in hospital, I felt that there was a tunnel visioned focus on the physical health of my body, detached from me as a sentient human being.

My mental health went downhill, and I became almost mute in appointments.

Writing my simple note changed everything

The day came when I faced the unimaginable reality of having my breast cut off. This felt almost too much to bear and impossible to voice. Then I had an idea. I wrote down my feelings in a note to give to medical staff on the day of my operation.

I was waiting nervously in my gown, when my surgeon came in. I handed her my note.

Suddenly the divide between patient and health professional disappeared. I saw her well up with tears while reading it, and she told me that no one had ever done this before. Later she told me how moved everyone in the operating theatre had been when my note was read out to them.

At last I felt really heard and seen, not as a piece of breast tissue, but as a human being. It made such a difference to me that the surgical team treating me listened and understood the impact of what was happening to me as a person, beyond my medical symptoms. It helped restore me when I was feeling so lost.

I’m a person, not a disease

I wish we cared for people’s health in a way that recognised how being ill can alter a person’s life and their sense of meaning, helping to relieve the interconnected pain between our mind and our body. Treating a person’s body as a separate entity from their personhood and sense of identity can exacerbate the psychological trauma of illness.

As I know from my work as a psychotherapist, and as I discovered by writing my note, at these times a genuine human understanding of who a person is, and how illness is affecting their life, is needed for emotional healing.3

Simple changes could help to integrate the link between psychological and physical healing in our care of people’s health. Imagine if a patient’s notes began with a very brief introduction that they’d written about themselves and how their illness affects their life. Starting with who the person is, rather than the details of their disease, could play a pivotal role in making interactions between healthcare staff and patients, and our healthcare, more human.

This would be a simple and effective way to start changing our approach from curing symptoms, towards healing and restoring people—not just physically, but in mind and soul too.