A Montreal woman who was told by health-care professionals that she was too young for breast cancer but later diagnosed with it, has died from the disease. Valerie Buchanan was 32 when she died at the end of February.
“I keep asking myself why anyone, but selfishly, why her?” Chris Scheepers, Buchanan’s husband told CTVNews.ca in a telephone interview. “She was a beautiful person. She was extremely driven, talented and positive. What really breaks me is our son won’t know the truly remarkable woman she was.”
Throughout 2020, Buchanan sought answers for a lump in her chest but had said she was reassured by multiple health-care professionals in Ottawa and Montreal that it was a benign cyst without sending her for imaging to confirm.
After 13 months, Buchanan eventually went to a private clinic and was diagnosed with Stage 3 triple-negative breast cancer – a biologically aggressive subtype of breast cancer. Just a few months later, she learned it was Stage 4.
In the US, another aspect is that the entire medical school system is set up to make it extremely difficult for people who are not already from wealthy families to become doctors.
The US underfunds residencies (due to lobbying by doctors who want to keep their wages high through scarcity). Because residencies are required to become doctors, this limits the number of people who can be let into medical school. Because the numbers are artificially (and harmfully - doctor shortages are ridiculous in rural areas) kept low, admissions also are kept low.
This creates an ultra competitive process where it’s about maintaining as close to a 4.0 GPA as possible while stacking up volunteer hours. (Eg - your best chances are when you don’t have to work, other than some dalliances with scribing.)
I really wanted to be a doctor at one point, but I realized that I would never be a competitive candidate against someone who wasn’t working and had parents paying for tutoring.