Emma Jarrett is heading to Harvard where she will speak to a class of medical students and perform parts of the one-woman show she created after recovering from breast cancer.
While at the Sunset Theatre as an artist in residence, she created Breastless, a show that explores her journey through cancer treatment and she hopes one that can help healthcare workers see patients as more than symptoms and numbers.
She described being diagnosed as going on overdrive. She got her tests done, she drove herself to Prince George for them and for awhile felt like it wasn't happening. Along with feelings of denial there was anger, especially when she was told she had to have a double mastectomy which is not what she wanted. She was scared. And she was frustrated, especially about not being heard by the healthcare workers who she had to trust to be treated.
"Doctors may have given that breast cancer diagnosis hundreds of times, but for that person, it's the first time and it's their lives and it's just thrown into chaos," Jarrett explained. She made it very clear that she knows healthcare workers have extremely difficult jobs and they work hard, but she hopes her experience can help them see the human side of patients. "I do hold a lot of compassion for doctors, wondering how does it get to be like this and what are they going through? Because I know they go through huge stresses."
She said she understands how healthcare workers may become desensitized from their training and doesn't want her work to come across as attacking them, but as trying to share her perspective to hopefully make patients feel more heard and that they're being treated as people rather than symptoms and cases.
"They're put through really awful traumatic experiences of long, long hours ad having to bounce from near death to death to birth that's led to a death. To just bounce around without any processing time. They're expected to not have any emotions," she said of medical training. "So then when they meet the patients needing to feel a human sort of empathy it's just not available."
Harvard instructor Jeff Rediger heard Jarrett's story and invited her to do a collaborative webinar where she could share her experience as a patient. Reidger explained that some doctors' primary goal is to impress their superiors.
"My experience is not everyone's but my experience was that I was not listened to," she said of her treatment. Because of that, during the webinar, she asked about the medical system and medical training, "Why do you function like this? What's going on in a doctor's mind and heart? And how does it get to be this place where we're just a symptom carrier, a number and then spat out the other end?"
After hearing from and working with Jarrett, Rediger invited her to speak to a leadership class at Harvard's medical school to share parts of Breastless and have a discussion about treatment of patients.
But she wanted people in Quesnel to have the opportunity to have a discussion on treatment, hearing her story and sharing their own experiences.
"Hoping people will also share some of their stories because I'm all about storytelling as an important part of our healing process. I think it's a huge, very important part of health generally let alone from some life-threatening chronic disease," she said. "(I hope) they may go away with more understanding of what a breast cancer diagnosis is like because unless you've had someone close to you (experience it), there's very little that we know."
Jarrett finds speaking locally more intimidating than speaking to the Harvard class, in part because she'll be talking to Harvard students over Zoom whereas she'll be in person at The Den and in part because she knows people who will be at her talk at The Den.
"I do know that two nurses are coming and they're hoping to bring a couple of our doctors which I find quite frightening," Jarrett said. "But I know that if I just stay in the story, they should gather that I'm angry at them, I'm not pointing fingers, I'm just saying 'you're in a difficult position here too' kind of thing."
She explained the concept of narrative medicine, asking the question "what matters to you?" and how it's important not just for the doctor to understand what matters to the patient, but for the doctor to understand what matters to themselves. Whether it's proving they can save lives and they care about the job or whether they care about ensuring the patient is heard and has a good experience.
"I'd like to think I can get that across at some point, the idea that medicine is a human interaction," Jarrett said.
In her piece she speaks to discrimination in healthcare.
"Generally patients are not listened to particularly well. And females have a certain experience, trans people have a certain, gay people have another experience. Then on the BIPOC level, dismissed even more," she said. She added there is a belief among some people in healthcare that black women don't feel as much pain and are treated differently in situations like giving birth. "It is just shocking the assumptions that aren't necessarily taught but are just part of our culture."
While Jarrett can't speak to the experiences of most of those groups, she does give her perspective on being a woman in treatment for breast cancer. While getting treatment, she wanted a lumpectomy (removal of tissue) after tumours were reduced by chemotherapy. But was pushed into a mastectomy.
"It's easy surgically but it's not easy emotionally," she said of a mastectomy. "As I say to men sometimes when I'm feeling bold, 'if you had testicular cancer and they said "oh just have them taken off, you'd be fine without them" would you think twice?'"
She said one of her favourite parts of performing Breastless is being able to connect with people who have gone through similar experiences themselves or have loved ones who did and hear their stories. People who get to understand what a mother who passed away might have been feeling, people who know exactly which doctors she referred to throughout the piece, people who asked that she keep telling the story because it gets says what many women don't.
"I'd like more conversation about that. Which comes from more women being willing to share that they have had a mastectomy and prevalent it is because mostly we cover it up. Mostly, you just don't know. And so no one actually gets to see how prevalent it is, which therefore means we don't do anything about it."
On average, 84 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in Canada each day. An estimated one in eight Canadian women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime. For signs and symptoms of breast cancer, visit cancer.ca.
While Jarrett was being treated, Jarrett surrounded herself with love and family, which is what helped her get through it. Something she said she had to do while being treated was let people help her.
Jarrett's performance at The Den will be April 24 at 6:30 p.m. with doors opening at 6 p.m. Tickets can be bought in advance by emailing Jarrett at emmasjarrett@gmail.com.
