About 10 years after a breast surgeon we interviewed returned to Dubai to practice, a colleague stopped her in a hospital corridor to tell her: “It’s great — since you came back I no longer see those advanced cases of breast cancer.”
She had not stopped to notice. “You get on the wheel,” she told us in an interview for our research. When you return to your home country after training abroad, you run your clinics, train your nurses, drive out to women’s groups in the hinterlands to give talks, design educational videos that explain breast self-examination without showing a breast, because that is what the censors will pass. You argue to have the word “breast” printed on your medical license; the authorities prefer “chest.” You establish a support group, then a drop-in center, likely the only cancer drop-in center in the Middle East. Somewhere in the middle of all that, you alter what late-stage breast cancer looks like in your country.
