From Patient to Pioneer: What Happened After Cancer

When I was diagnosed with cancer, my focus was understandably on surviving it.

There were treatments to get through, appointments to attend and decisions to make. Like so many people facing cancer, the immediate goal was quite simple: Get through this.

But the cancer journey didn't have a clear finishing line. Even when treatment was completed, there were years of follow-up ahead and the knowledge that recurrence can remain a possibility.

And while I was still finding my way through that journey, my body was already dealing with the consequences of what it had been through.  Within months of my surgery, I began experiencing pain, swelling and tightness in my pelvic area. At first, I thought these changes were simply part of what my body had been through. I'd had major surgery, so it seemed understandable that things would feel different.

But what I was experiencing was lymphoedema.  I hadn't reached the end of my cancer journey only to begin another one. The two were already overlapping.

While I was still attending cancer follow-up appointments and living with the uncertainty that comes with those years after treatment, I was also having to understand and learn to manage the consequences of disruption to my lymphatic system.

I started asking questions

I wanted to understand my lymphatic system.

• Why was fluid accumulating?

• Where had normal lymphatic flow been disrupted?

• What actually helped lymphatic fluid move?

I also wanted to understand the treatments available to me.

• How did they work?

• What were they doing physically to influence lymphatic fluid movement?

• And how did that relate to what I was learning about the lymphatic system itself?

And increasingly, I became interested in another question: What role did movement play?

Those questions eventually led me to start experimenting on my own body.

I wasn't trying to establish a medical technology company. I was a patient trying to understand what was happening to my body and find a better way to live with something that had become part of my life.

Over time, that questioning, and experimentation developed into the thinking behind Differential Pressure Technology – DP-Tx™.

Later, when women experiencing breast lymphoedema approached me for help, that same thinking began to be applied to another area of lymphatic disruption.

Eventually, the DP-Tx™ Bra Insert was developed.

But technology isn't really where my story began

It began with being a patient.

And perhaps more importantly, it began with deciding that having another condition to manage wasn't going to define what happened next.