Helen Allen
So where to start with this little bio? I guess my primary qualification here is my diagnosis of invasive ductal carcinoma in my left breast, with evidence of cancer cells in one lymph node. I was officially given a diagnosis and presented with a treatment plan on May 23rd 2017.
My complementary qualifications for engaging in this exercise are being a staff nurse, qualified and in continuous practice since 2001, and also as the founder and CEO of a registered UK charity (PEPAIDS) working in Zambia to alleviate poverty and HIV/AIDS, since 2001.
Interestingly, I felt called to close PEPAIDS in 2016 and have been simultaneously closing the PEPAIDS chapter in my life, whilst embarking on the cancer chapter! The website www.pepaids.org will only be visible for a few more months. Thankfully, I have some other evidence that PEPAIDS was a real thing that seemed to have inspired others along the way…
In 2011 I was awarded Nurse of the Year, by the British Journal of Nursing; that little accolade saw me chosen in the public ballot to carry the Olympic Torch in 2012. In 2013 Marks and Spencer chose me to be one of their “Britain’s Leading Ladies”, alongside a much more famous Helen (of the Dame Mirren variety!) and 10 other well-known women. In 2014 I was named as one of the 40 Faces of Trafford, the borough in which I live, to celebrate it’s 40th anniversary, and in 2015 The University of Nottingham awarded me an honorary Dr of Laws, making me a Dr nurse, which is very confusing!! I don’t use the title at work!
Kind recognitions and accolades aside, I think my primary motivation for all that I do, is that I want to help people be all that they can be in whatever situation they find themselves in. How apt then, that I now find myself in an unexpected, unpredictable situation, where I need to pro-actively seek to be all that I can be. I need to take on the role of allowing myself to be helped, rather than being the helper. This will be an interesting role reversal!
My relationship with Dr Rosanna Montgomery dates back almost 20 years, to our student days at The University of Nottingham, when we started living together in the 4th year of our degrees- mine a Bachelor of Nursing and, hers, Medicine. We have both always been fascinated by the variety of life- interested in everyone’s experience and motivations. We share an aptitude for critical thinking and open-mindedness. We both have a healthy respect for others’ belief systems and points of view, even if we don’t agree with them ourselves.
The thing I admire most about Rosanna is her resolve to act in the best interests of others. I love the way that she does not let convention or the pressures of a system, stop her from doing all that she can to help someone achieve the best health they can have under her care. When she left her last job, as a GP, the feedback she had was overwhelmingly positive, from patients and colleagues alike, about her thorough and caring approach, in spite of the difficulties that caused to her personally and the dilemmas she faced daily in a professional sense. We’re both very similar in that respect. I think that is one of the reasons why our friendship has gone from strength to strength over the years.
The bottom line is I love my friend, I trust my friend and I want to involve her in my journey. This is something that is interesting to her and it makes sense to me. We may discover something, we may not, but, if nothing else, the need to fill in a spreadsheet of my diet and symptoms four times a day will motivate me to move if I don’t feel like doing anything! This sounds like the ultimate irony coming from a nurse who’s just been given 9 months off work, but, let the documentation begin!
Dr Helen Allen LLD (Hon) BN (Hons)
Rosanna Montgomery
I was always taught to greet people by making eye contact, shaking their hand and introducing myself… the so-called airy-fairy Communication Skills lectures at Medical School. But then people got funny about infection control and decided we should drop the handshake.
I never did.
But I’m not a doctor any more. Or at least, I’m “on a break” since I had my 3rd child and started wondering at what point I should start looking after myself and my family before trying to look after others. (I’m sure other people are better at multi-tasking than me but I was pretty close to burn-out…)
I used to be a GP and, before that, I started training to be a General Physician and Rheumatologist. I changed to General Practice for many reasons but mainly because I thought it would be easier to achieve a good work-life balance when I wanted to start having children, but somehow it didn’t quite work out that way….
And so I’ve been bumbling along, trying to be a “good mother”, and trying to support my husband who has to work long hours to earn enough money to allow me the perceived luxury to “stay at home”, but having a sense of wanting to put my knowledge, skills & experience to good use without knowing how best to do it.
Then one day, out of the blue, my mum gave me a present. A book entitled “The Diet Myth – The Real Science Behind What We Eat” written by London-based Professor of Genetic Epidemiology, Tim Spector. I didn’t really understand why she’d given me a book about dieting as I am, if anything, verging on underweight, but I decided to humour her and read it.
As it happens, I think it has genuinely changed my life. It introduced me to concepts that I had vaguely been aware of, and developed theories based on good evidence, that somehow brought together so many things from both my personal and professional lives that I “sort of knew” and “sort of believed”, and then made sense of them.
It didn’t just change the way I think about food and eating, but it changed the way I look at the whole world – through the prism of our absolute need to live symbiotically with nature. Something I’d always hoped, somehow, in some way, to be true. I’m a tree-hugger at heart I think…
Anyway, so I learnt about the significance of the “gut microbiome” and what part it may play in practically every aspect of our physical and mental wellbeing, and indeed what part it may play in both the development and management of many diseases.
I was suddenly encouraged to embrace the millions of microscopic bacteria, yeasts and viruses which live around and within us, and to nourish positive relationships with them so that they, in turn, may work to keep us healthy.
So maybe it was ok to shake all of those hands after all?
In fact, maybe it helped to diversify both my own and my patients’ microbiomes, just a little bit…?
If that doesn’t mean anything to you yet, hopefully this blog will enlighten you…
I certainly felt enlightened. I was so excited about everything I read that I immediately started to try to optimise my own and my family’s diet, and to change my approach to “dirt” and “germs” after years of “antimicrobial training” in the NHS. Cue 1 year old daughter eating a lump of clay…
I know, I know, it’s all crazy though isn’t it?!
But please don’t be put off by my evangelism. This isn’t all just me getting carried away with the latest media hype… it is the fact that there is some good old scientific method behind all of this madness that makes it all so exciting. And whilst good evidence can be hard to come by, and even harder to make sense of in the real world, authors like Tim Spector, Ben Goldacre and Michael Mosley, who are all doctors themselves who have an amazing capacity for putting the latest research into simple, clear and understandable language, do a very good job of this.
So of course, after reading “The Diet Myth” I started to wonder how else I could learn more about all of this and then put my new-found knowledge to good use, in combination with my own previously acquired medical knowledge and experience (whilst primarily still being a “home-maker” and “primary care giver” to my children).
It can only have been a few weeks later, however, that Helen, one of my best friends, told me about her diagnosis of breast cancer.
Once we had both got over the initial shock of this, I followed Helen’s lead of overwhelming positivity, and we talked about how we could make the best of this challenging situation. One day, I happened to mention that I’d been reading about all this “ microbiome stuff” and Helen was keen for me to find out more to see if it could help her.
And so this is where our journey together started and why this blog has come into being. I am a self-confessed technophobe and would far rather write in a beautifully illustrated, hard-back journal, than fiddle about with a keyboard and computer screen, with a persistently dodgy internet connection, but we felt that it was important to share this journey of discovery with as many others as possible so that it may help those going through a similar experience to make a little sense of all of that confusing information out there.
We certainly don’t have all of the answers, but I hope in our pursuit to find a few of them, we help to ensure that Helen stays fit and well throughout her treatment, and that we may even be able to help that treatment be a little more effective, with fewer side effects. Who knows what is possible?
I’m very excited to find out.
Please do come along and join us.
Dr Rosanna Montgomery BMedSci (Hons) BMBS MRCP DFSRH MRCGP
Header image credit: Intestinal Bacteria (Homo sapiens) – We Are Not Alone! by Micronaut.
Dr. Martin Oeggerli is Micronaut . The Swiss science photographer has appeared in five National Geographic feature articles since December 2009 and has been invited to the 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale by prominent Chinese artist and director Ai Weiwei.
Micronaut is using his scientific expertise and personally-executed preparation, scanning-electron-microscopy (SEM) and post-processing to display his unique perspective with profound clarity.
Since 2005 his award-winning works are published by the greatest names in science and photography, such as BBC, CELL, Nature, VOGUE, and National Geographic.
This particular hand-coloured scanning electron micrograph reveals the large number and variability of bacteria that are present in human excrement. Additionally, a plant fibre has passed the intestinal tract almost unharmed and spans from the centre towards the right of the frame. In the bottom right hand corner a portion of a large and spherical shaped structure turns out to be the cyst of a Giardia parasite (brown) – the actual reason why the person went to see a doctor… But apart from the unusual parasitic supplement the bacterial fauna looks fairly well-sorted.
Micronaut’s work has been described as an unconventional dance between science and art.
Dr Oeggerli has been working in cancer research for over 10 years and has been supporting the Basel Area Children’s Cancer Foundation since the beginning of 2017. You can find out more about this good cause at the following links:
http://www.micronaut.ch/basel-area-childrens-cancer-foundation/
http://www.stiftung-kinderkrebs.ch/de/willkommen
(in German)
Glossary and useful links (also see Useful Resources page)
General Practitioner (GP): Family Doctor
General Physician: Hospital Doctor who deals with anything that does not come under the remit of the surgeons or any other obvious speciality such as Paediatrics (children) or Obstetrics (pregnant women)
Rheumatologist: Hospital Doctor who specialises in joints and stuff – arthritis
Genetic Epidemiologist: Doctor who looks at patterns of health and disease particularly in relation to people’s genetic make-up
The Diet Myth – The Real Science Behind What We Eat: book by Tim Spector, Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King’s College London and author; see http://www.tim-spector.co.uk/
Good evidence: information gained from a robust scientific approach (although a strict Evidence-Based Approach to medicine with all its complexities and individual variation does have significant limitiations – see this interesting article in the British Medical Journal: Evidence based medicine: a movement in crisis?)
Gut microbiome: see Gut Reaction (What is your gut?) page
National Health Service (NHS): Free at the point-of-access medical service in UK
Ben Goldacre: British doctor, academic and writer with a background in psychiatry, epidemiology and Evidence-Based Medicine; author of “Bad Science” and Bad Medicine”; see https://www.phc.ox.ac.uk/team/ben-goldacre and http://www.badscience.net/about-dr-ben-goldacre/
Michael Mosley: according to Wikipedia he is a non-practising doctor with a background in Psychiatry with a much longer career in science and medicine broadcasting and journalism; see also: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/2kczjZKp8sGSDxSxKYzxsyr/michael-mosley; he is author of “The Clever Guts Diet: How to Revolutionise your body from the inside out”; see https://cleverguts.com/