A young woman who was inspired to pursue a degree in medicine after facing cancer herself as a teenager is celebrating graduating from university.
Diagnosed with an aggressive soft tissue cancer at the age of 14, Ellie Waters-Barnes was given a one in five chance of survival.
But the experience helped forge her career path and she said had given her a “superpower” that not every medic was able to tap in to.
Now 25 and still struggling in some respects physically, she has just graduated from Keele University and said her own experience of undergoing treatment gave her a better understanding what patients were going through.
She said news that she had stage four alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma in September 2015 turned her life upside down.
“I went from being a very healthy, fit teenage girl to having this very intensive treatment that made me very ill,” Waters-Barnes said.
She underwent 18 months of treatment at Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham.
“I lost lots of weight, lost my hair, I had to be tube fed,” she said.
“The first nine months was intensive chemotherapy and then I had 28 sessions of radiotherapy, and then I had a year of maintenance chemotherapy.
“I’m all clear now, thank goodness, but at the time the cancer was very aggressive. I feel very lucky to be here today.”
