I grew up in poverty. I watched my family come apart under the weight of pain and silence, and at seven years old I made a vow: the violence stops with me. Education was the door out. I walked through it and I kept walking.

Then I became the patient. Metastatic thyroid cancer. The complications that followed took my voice for three months.

But it did not stop there. Eight years later, a large pelvic tumour that took major surgery. Osteoporosis in my late forties. Menopause, with no one to guide me through it.

So when you tell me you are exhausted, or dismissed, or frightened by what your body is doing, I am not reading that from a textbook. I have lived a version of it, and I paved my path so I could help pave yours.

I bring 25 years of medicine to this work, and 52 years of living. Both of them count as they are integrated.