BECOMING a surgeon is tough enough for any ambitious young doctor. Imagine how much harder when, just a few weeks before your final surgical exams, you wind up in hospital yourself with pneumonia.
That is precisely the position Aaron Brown found himself in last September.
He had been feeling unwell for a while. “I thought I had a bit of a cold, maybe the flu,” he admits. He went to see another doctor, and that was when he got the bad news. “I was admitted with pneumonia.”
He spent two weeks in St James’s, in Leeds. But his exams were looming, and he wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of his ambition to qualify as a surgeon. He continued revising. “And I managed to get day release from hospital to do a surgical course I wanted,” he says with a grin. He finished his treatment on a Tuesday. “And then I sat my final surgeon’s exam on the Friday.”
He passed it, too. Now, at the age of 26, he is an orthopaedic surgeon and senior house officer at York Teaching Hospital.
It says a lot for his determination and ambition that he didn’t let a bout of pneumonia stand in his way. But then, this is a young man who has got used to dealing with serious illness.
At four days old, he was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis (CF). It is an inherited condition, caused by a single defective gene, which means the internal organs – especially the lungs and digestive system – become clogged with sticky mucus. This results in difficulty digesting food – and in chronic infection and inflammation in the lungs. Hence that bout of pneumonia he suffered.
The severity of the symptoms caused by CF can vary. But as of yet, there is no cure. And while treatments are steadily improving, most CF sufferers can expect a shorter life than other people. “Normally, the life expectancy of somebody born today with CF is about 40,” Aaron says, without batting an eyelid.
We’re sitting chatting over a cup of coffee in the canteen at York Hospital. Aaron doesn’t like to make a fuss about the fact he has CF.
The hospital knows, of course – but many of the colleagues he works with day to day don’t. He hopes, when they do find out, that it won’t change the way they see him. “I would hope they know me for who I am.” He has a very good reason for speaking out about his condition.
Next week is Cystic Fibrosis Week. Aaron has been chosen by the Cystic Fibrosis Trust as one of the four national ‘faces’ of the week, and he hopes his story can be a source of comfort and inspiration to families of children newly diagnosed with the condition, as well as helping to overcome the negative stereotype that some have of people with CF as victims.
He is anything but. He checked recently, and he is the first person with CF to be enrolled in the Royal College of Surgeons. “But hopefully, just the first of many.”
A surgeon’s life is a pretty gruelling one. Most days he gets to work at 7.30am. Between then and 5pm or 6pm he will iassist, as a junior orthopaedic surgeon, in operations on up to four or five people – everything from hip and knee replacements to dealing with badly broken bones or inserting plates or screws.
When he’s on call, which is about once every five working days, the schedule is even tougher. Those days he will be on duty 13 hours at a stretch, dealing with trauma cases admitted through A&E.
Doesn’t it get exhausting? Well, yes, he admits: but no more so for him than for anyone else.
The main difficulty he has, as a doctor with CF, is fitting in the time he needs to take his own medication.
Because he is constantly prone to lung infections, he has to inhale antibiotics through a nebuliser three times a day. He also has to take antibiotics in tablet form – as well as enzymes with every meal to help him digest food. If he doesn’t, he will very quickly develop a stomach ache, he says.
In all, he takes over 35 tablets a day. And he also has a rigorous regime of exercise and physiotherapy – breathing exercises to help clear his lungs and throat, running on a treadmill, even a bit of tennis. “It is important to keep active so your lungs don’t get clogged up,” he says. “But it can be difficult fitting all that in when you’re working long hours on call.”
It is vital not to ease up on the routine, though, he stresses. As a teenager, he tended to rebel against the iron regime of self-medication needed to keep healthy.
The result was that he was admitted to hospital several times with nasty, and potentially life-threatening, chest infections.
“You do rebel as a teenager,” he says. “There were some days when I would just neglect my medication. It can be hard when you don’t see the immediate benefit.” But as he grew older, he got fed up with the constant infections. Since then, thanks to being disciplined, taking his medication rigorously, eating well and exercising regularly, he has only had to be admitted to hospital twice as an adult – including that bout of pneumonia last September.
Having CF doesn’t in any way affect his ability to be a good doctor, he says. He is not supposed to treat other CF patients – there are certain germs that CF patients are vulnerable to that don’t affect anybody without the condition, so he is best off avoiding patients with CF.
That apart, he believes his medical history helps make him a better doctor.
It is often said that a history of serious illness as a child is a very bad reason for wanting to be a doctor, he says. And he agrees with that. It wasn’t what drove him into medicine: he was just interested in science at school.
Having said that, it does help him to be able to see things from a patient’s point of view.
“Having cystic fibrosis means that you are in and out of hospital all your life, and I think my experiences as a patient give me an insight into what my own patients must go through,” he says. “I am privileged in a way, because you cannot learn that from a book.”
Having CF may not have been what made him want to be a doctor – but it certainly helped to make him the determined person he is now, he admits. “I think it drove me to overcompensate, to prove that it hasn’t affected me.” Hence his desire to become a surgeon – one of the most intense and gruelling specialisms in medicine.
Having worked so hard to pass his surgery exams, it seems a shame that he is now thinking of becoming a GP instead.
It’s a lifestyle choice, he says. He and his partner, Rebecca Grimes, a 22-year-old events manager with a local company, want to buy their house in Badger Hill, then plan to start a family together. So he doesn’t fancy slogging for another 12 years at least before becoming a consultant.
And did his condition have anything to do with it? The grim thought that at any time he could become gravely ill?
No, he says firmly. “I’m quite clear in my own mind that I’m not changing career because of CF. That would be a sort of failure.”
He and Becky don’t dwell on his condition, or on the possibility that he could die at a relatively early age, he says. “We can’t predict the future. The survival age of people with CF is getting higher and higher. And I could be run over by a bus tomorrow. There’s no point living in fear.”
• Aaron Brown will be running in the Beverly 10K race on Sunday, to raise money for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. To sponsor him, visit uk.virginmoneygiving.com/ChristinaDavis
Living with cystic fibrosis
Cystic fibrosis (CF), which is caused by a single defective gene, is one of the UK’s most common life-threatening inherited diseases.
The internal organs, especially the lungs and digestive system, become clogged with thick sticky mucus resulting in chronic infections and inflammation in the lungs and difficulty digesting food.
Around 8,500 people in the UK have CF – and one in every 2,500 babies born.
One person in 25 carries the faulty CF gene, usually without knowing – more than two million people in the UK have it.
If two people who carry the gene have a baby, the child has a one-in- four chance of having CF. The disease is not contagious and can only be caused by inheriting two copies of the faulty gene from parents who are both carriers.
There is no cure, and only half of those living with CF are likely to live past their late 30s.
Next week is Cystic Fibrosis Week. Money raised during the week will fund research into treatments and will help the Cystic Fibrosis Trust improve the care of people with CF. Visit cfweek.org for more information.
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