09/05/2019
The final Vintage Fundraiser is being planned for Saturday, 12th October in aid of this amazing organization! 💕
‘I’ll never forget the shock of being confronted with my first really ill patient as a medical student. Until then, treating patients was all theory and I could quite easily distance myself. Then suddenly I was facing the human at the other end of the textbook, witnessing very real emotions.
Although doctors are trained not to get emotionally involved because we need healthy boundaries to serve our patients best, stepping too far back does both doctor and patient a disservice. I always seek a human connection. Without it, being a doctor would lose much of its sense of purpose. I want the opportunity for true healing which involves the whole patient, not just the physical body.
Breast cancer patients face so many challenges which begin long before they need surgery. The first challenge is getting a diagnosis, particularly in rural communities where the healthcare system is under greater pressure. Once you have a diagnosis, you face similar challenges over treatment. Everything you take for granted when you have a private medical aid is unavailable to the majority of South Africans. Whether the patient needs surgery, chemotherapy, radiology, follow up, nutritional guidance or psychosocial support, there aren’t the resources to treat them. And so the backlog builds.
This is the conversation I was having one evening at wine club. They’d all heard me talk about it before but this time one of my friends challenged me: ‘So what are you going to do about it?’ I didn’t know it at the time but that question was the seed that became Project Flamingo. I suddenly realised the system wasn’t going to change quickly enough, so it really was up to me.
Ideas whizzed around my head for a while and the one that survived was giving breast cancer patients free mastectomies over weekends and public holidays, thus reducing waiting time. We needed to pay for use of the theatre and the nursing staff, but doctors and anaesthetists would work for free. That was in 2010. One of my friends, Michelle Rennie, was a cancer survivor who raced in a dragon boat with other survivors, and they pledged R10,000 for our first surgery. Michelle became intimately involved in the project and helped shape its trajectory as a non-profit company, becoming its director.
With Michelle’s connections we started fundraising – we never knew where the money would come from but it always came, and it got easier in time. By 2013 we could plan a year in advance and that’s when we knew for sure that it was a long-term initiative”
- Dr Liana Roodt, Surgeon and Founder Project Flamingo
In 2018 Project Flamingo completed its 500th surgery.
Full story here:
https://www.thislifeonline.co.za/surgeon-liana-wine-club-challenge-healthy-tips/
