E78: Starting Over After Cancer

Lisa Sharp, Project Coordinator for Charles River, joins us to discuss her COVID lockdown experience. Right at the beginning of the pandemic, just weeks apart, both she and her husband were diagnosed with cancer. Sadly, he didn't make it. While Lisa and their daughter faced the worst, she decided to make big changes to her life and career. Listen now to hear her story.

• Podcast transcript

  Mary Parker:

  I'm Mary Parker, and welcome to this episode of Eureka's Sounds of Science. I'm joined today by Lisa Sharp, Project Coordinator for Discovery at Charles River. Over the pandemic, Lisa and her family dealt with a double cancer diagnosis that changed many things, including the trajectory of her career. She's here to tell us her story. Welcome, Lisa.

  Lisa Sharp:

  Thank you, Mary, for having me. It's nice to talk to you today.

  Mary Parker:

  So first of all, can you tell us a bit about your family?

  Lisa Sharp:

  Okay. So yeah. So during the time this all happened in the pandemic, it was myself, my husband, and at the time, my daughter, our daughter was 12 years old. So just about to hit those terrible teenage years, which was challenging in itself without everything else that sort of ensued after that, really.

  Mary Parker:

  And can you tell us what happened?

  Lisa Sharp:

  At the very end of 2019, so myself and my husband both received different cancer diagnoses, but approximately four weeks apart, which is quite unusual in itself. My husband was diagnosed first with a head and neck cancer, and then literally four weeks, almost to the day, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. So that was tough.

  Mary Parker:

  Timing couldn't have been worse. Yeah.

  Lisa Sharp:

  Yeah. So we were lucky enough to get the first part of our diagnoses before the madness of COVID and lockdown hitting us, and things obviously got predictably worse after that because obviously everything else was much more complicated than it would've otherwise been outside of the pandemic.

  Mary Parker:

  And after this, what kind of treatments did you both get?

  Lisa Sharp:

  Predominantly, both of us started off with surgery first. So my husband had a few surgeries and then went on to have six weeks of radiotherapy, which was daily, which was extremely grueling on him. And given that it was head and neck as well, it was all to the face and the neck. So, the skin was heavily affected, obviously very sunburnt, very sore, broken skin, blistered skin, so quite difficult for him to manage daily.

  And also, it affected his eating as well, because obviously it was making his mouth very sore and blistered, so that affected the things he could and couldn't eat. The things he wanted to eat weren't necessarily the things he could eat. Certain things made his mouth sorer or more blistered, so we had to massively adapt things for him daily. I had surgery first and then I went on to have almost two years of chemotherapy, and I had radiotherapy in amongst that as well. So I had 15 rounds of radiotherapy as well.

  Mary Parker:

  What's the difference between chemotherapy and radiotherapy?

  Lisa Sharp:

  Okay. So chemotherapy is a drug that's generally infused either by IV or you can have it in tablet form, depending on the type of drug. And then radiotherapy is basically sort of a laser treatment effectively. So you lay under a scanning machine and radio waves are passed through your body to try and break up any remaining cancer cells, or to just shrink or disperse the cancer cells within the air affected area of your body.

  Mary Parker:

  So it's kind of a double whammy, like internal and external getting at the cancer. So what were the side effects for you and for him?

  Lisa Sharp:

  My husband only had two rounds of chemotherapy. Unfortunately, it was actually during the second round of his chemotherapy that he had catastrophic respiratory failure, which was inevitably what took his life. Myself, I had 24 rounds of chemotherapy in the end, multiple different drugs. Some did work, some didn't work. Obviously the latter one being the one that did work, which is the one that Charles River played quite a big hand in. To my knowledge, they may have done the others as well, but this was the one that I've found out the most.

  General tiredness, I was very lethargic. It affected my eating, it affected my taste buds. So, certain foods that I really enjoyed didn't taste right anymore, or even the texture of food in your mouth was unpleasant. It affected my platelet levels, so I bruised very easily. I was suffering from bleeding gums, heavy nosebleeds, I had bone pain, joint pain. I had very bad neuropathy in my fingers and toes, so it was kind of like a constant feeling of pins and needles. Almost like when you get really cold and then you go into the warm and they sort of feel like they're coming back to life, but that feeling never went and it was quite painful in the cold, or extreme temperature changes made it worse.

  Obviously that affected my ability to look after my daughter because sometimes I wasn't well enough to care for her. My husband was also generally not well enough to care for her, and we were also then isolated from our family. So, there was very few people that could actually step in and help because we were obviously vulnerable and having to shield from the world, because obviously getting COVID at that time would've been very bad news for us, given that neither of us had a particularly good immune system at the time. So, that made things difficult. And obviously at the time, all the schools were shut. So I was trying to homeschool my daughter in amongst all of this as well and keep her schoolwork going through Zoom meetings and Zoom classrooms. So it was a bit chaotic at times.

  Mary Parker:

  Yeah. This is a bit of a tangent, but how did your daughter do with the whole online school thing? I know some kids hated it, some kids liked it. It was kind of all over the place.

  Lisa Sharp:

  At first, she kind of hated it and was almost like, "Well, my school's shut, so why do I have to do this?" In a typical 12-year-old attitude, in that sense. School's not too serious yet, and they kind of don't realize that actually those years are they going to be the ones that are building them towards their exams and are quite important.

  But I think as time went on and myself and my husband got quite poorly and things got quite bad for us, it actually became a nice distraction for her. So it kind of played a double-edged sword. It was not great that it was schoolwork, but it was also something that just took her out of the worry and the stress that was our daily life, which was not great for a 12-year-old to be having to live through.

  Mary Parker:

  Yeah. Did your district do Zoom school?

  Lisa Sharp:

  Yeah. So they had had Zoom classrooms, and so she had some of her school friends and some children from other schools. If they had problems with technology, they all then joined together. So they got to meet other children that they would maybe not otherwise have met from other local primary schools and secondary schools, so in that sense, it was quite good.

  Mary Parker:

  So, can you circle back and describe the treatment that you got that you know came from Charles River?

  Lisa Sharp:

  Yeah, so although it was still hard and tough, it made general day-to-day living just that bit easier. I could sort of go back to caring for my daughter and being a mom and all the things that she needed, given at that time I started that drug, we'd actually lost my husband, so it was just us. So, it enabled me to be less tired. I was still getting the nosebleeds and the bleeding gums and some of those things, but my taste buds weren't so affected.

  I had lost all of my hair during the other treatments, which obviously you can see me now as a short-haired person, but I had very long blonde hair before, more like Rapunzel. So I look very different now. I'd lost all my eyebrows, eyelashes, everything. So, it enabled all of that to start to grow back. So I started to get a bit of my own personality and individuality and confidence back as a person. I'd looked less like a poorly cancer patient and more just like a normal person, which sounds like a really small thing, but it's a nice thing to have.

  Yeah, so eating became easier, I was less tired, my bones and my neuropathy, that sort of dissipated. I was not having to have steroids which didn't keep me awake at night, so I was starting to just generally sleep a bit better, and able to just function like a normal person and still keep up with the treatment. So I was kind of able to lead a much more comfortable double life. So I had the patient life and the normal life, and they could sort of run parallel rather than one controlling and taking over the other.

  Mary Parker:

  That must've been really intense, going through all that while also dealing with the logistics and the horribleness of losing your husband. What kind of strengths did you draw on in that time?

  Lisa Sharp:

  So at that time, really, the most important thing to me, and the thing that drove me to carry on, was that carry under no circumstances was my daughter going to become an orphan. There was no way I was going to allow that to happen. Whatever happened, I had to stay here because I was all she had left. So, I would've thrown whatever I had to into that, whatever part of me, however hard, however tough, I would've done anything it took to keep going because she needed me more than ever.

  And our family had already gone through so much. The thought of them having to go through losing me as well was just a step too far, so I suppose that lit... I've always been quite a tough person. I've always been quite a level-headed person. And I'll take anything that I need to do and do it well, but that sort of really ignited the inner fire just that little bit more, that yeah, under no circumstances was I going to go down without a massively huge fight. So yeah, that kind of kept me going every day.

  Mary Parker:

  Yeah. You mentioned your family. Was your extended family able to help at all, like order you groceries or do anything virtually? It must've been hard for them, too.

  Lisa Sharp:

  Yeah, doorstop drops, they were there for food deliveries. I even had people coming to sit on the lawn in deck chairs when the weather was nice, just so that I could see a different face. They weren't allowed in the house, they weren't allowed too close. We couldn't hug or show any affection in that way, but they would literally sit on my lawn. I would sit in the doorway of my house and we would talk like you're having a normal conversation in the living room of your house, but half in the house, half in the garden. They were bringing picnics to the door, they were just spending hours trying to just distract us and keep us sane while everything else around us just seemed like total chaos. That was kind of a few hours of the day each day that just felt normal and you could sort of pretend that the world hadn't gone crazy.

  Mary Parker:

  Yeah. This is another little tangent, but were you able to get the vaccine in the first group of people because you were at higher risk?

  Lisa Sharp:

  Yeah, so myself and other members of my family that were kind of considered as direct carers, so my mum and my husband's mum, were also allowed in that category because of me. So I was lucky enough to be offered. So I had the first two vaccines pretty quick. I was in the first bracket for both of those. And then after that, my vulnerability had sort of tailed off a little bit, and my immunity had started to build back up naturally so I could then go back into the normal runnings like everybody else and just have them at the right intervals.

  My immune system wasn't so attacked by the last chemotherapy drug. It was still not great, but not sort of newborn baby weak. I was treated like a complete vulnerable in the beginning, but that had just kind of leveled back out and I was a bit more normal, so I could just go back into the pot with everybody else and just have them when required.

  Mary Parker:

  So, how did this experience affect your career? What made you decide to seek out Charles River?

  Lisa Sharp:

  So, I had been in the travel industry for 24 years prior to this. That was pretty much what I did since I left college, in various different roles, from being on the phone, selling holidays to people, right up to aviation buying, which was my last role. I suppose COVID played quite a big hand in that because obviously travel was massively affected by COVID. It became extremely hard to go anywhere. Everything was grounded, obviously then nothing operated for a long time, but when it did kind of come back, it didn't bounce back very quickly. It became quite a difficult industry to work in. It wasn't fun anymore. The fun that I remembered and that fondly kind of drew me to that career in the first place, it had gone.

  And at that point, I started to ask myself, "Really, is this still for me? Do I want to keep doing this or do I want to do something where I feel like I'm giving back, or I'm doing something that makes a real difference to people in the world?" And that's when I started to look at other things, whether I go to work in the hospital or whether I go to work for one of the charities that had sort of helped us, or just generally sort of started to look out different opportunities.

  And I stumbled across Charles River and looked at all the great work, and looked at all the information on the website and what great things they'd done and thought, "Yeah, do you know what? I think that's the kind of organization that I want to work for." And sort of even be just a tiny part of making that difference in the world and hopefully helping the future versions of myself, either have a better journey than I did, or really avoid getting into a situation where they were losing family members to these diseases. And maybe in the future, we can just make that survival rate that much better and less people have to leave this earth because of a disease like this.

  Mary Parker:

  I can tell you that I was working for a Charles River at the time. I think I've mentioned this before on the podcast, but during the whole pandemic, it was nice to work at a place that was actively searching for vaccines and treatments. And I was actually on a work trip in the UK in March 2020. I flew home the day before airports were closed. Just constantly writing stories about the research we were doing on COVID, it just made me feel a little bit better. So, I absolutely get that impulse.

  Lisa Sharp:

  Yeah, I can understand how that would've made you feel. And that was very lucky that you managed to get back before the world sort of completely shut down in its entirety for the first time in the whole of my life, and hopefully the only time it'll happen in my life. That must must've been pretty good timing on your part.

  Mary Parker:

  You mentioned some of the charities. So what kind of support were you able to get from those charities during this time?

  Lisa Sharp:

  Yeah, so obviously things are slightly different in the UK than they're in the US. So through our UK hospitals, we're actually assigned a specialist nurse when you get diagnosed with cancer over here, and they work very closely with a charity called Macmillan. And they are there to provide, not just help through the treatment or help at the hospitals for those, especially elderly patients that might need help just walking to their appointments and having to leave family outside of the hospital, but have made that quite difficult for some people.

  I obviously didn't have any of those kind of problems. Mobility wasn't a problem, but they helped with general things. They could offer you counseling, they could offer support to your family to help them through. Because I think it's very easy to forget that as a cancer patient you are going through all the physicality of the disease and the illness and the treatments and the operations, but it's really hard for your outside family to be able to cope with what's happening to you and the complete feeling of helplessness.

  And I can definitely say that that is true, because I unfortunately was in the privileged position to be on both sides of that. I was a patient, but also I was the helpless wife that couldn't help the unwell husband. So, I was kind of walking on both sides of that unusual fence at the same time, which again, is quite a rare thing. So I know firsthand how my family must have been feeling about my diagnosis because that's exactly how I felt about my husband's.

  So, it was really nice to know that I had people that I could talk to outside of that, that weren't going to be upset by what I was saying and I could get things off my chest that I needed to sort of help me through that. Or I could talk to them about my husband without talking to his mom or my mom. And then those people have got real emotions and feelings directly resulted of that, and so you don't really get everything off your chest because you're very aware that what you're saying may upset them or may trigger them in an emotional state, that you don't want to be the reason, you don't want to be the cause of that extra worry or stress. So that was a massive help to me and my daughter.

  But also, just the practical things like you're off work for a year. What happens if your employer stops paying you or what happens if there's a financial strain and you don't really know how to keep your family afloat or pay your bills? So they're there for practical things as well. They can refer you to other services that help you or can help you figure out what you may or may not be entitled to, or help that you may not be aware of that you can seek and access. So they were a great help.

  But also, I found other charities through social media. I know sometimes social media can have negative things in the world and negative impacts in the world, as we all know. But through that time where the world was so isolated, I think social media kind of came into its own in a positive way. So I found another couple of charities, which I now help out and try and give back a bit if I can, that was started by normal people that were going through the same thing as me in the pandemic, and reached out to people and said, "Hey, look, I'm going through this. I'm here if you want to talk to some like-minded people."

  And it kind of just grew and grew and grew. And now, we sort of hold charity events or they hold charity events that I sort of help and attend at all across the uk. It's just sort of growing and growing, and the need for it is becoming more and more apparent. So, I think it was a great thing that started off very small, but it's now doing great work.

  Mary Parker:

  Obviously nurses and therapists and other professionals are incredibly valuable, but there's just something about being able to complain to people who know exactly what you're talking about. That absolutely is absolutely valuable.

  Lisa Sharp:

  Yeah, so it was nice. Like you say, you can be completely honest, and they can absolutely sit there and go, "I know 100% how you feel. I know exactly what you're saying. I've lived through it. I've been through it." Because as much as your family wants to help, they can only empathize to a point. And I'm really grateful that they can only empathize to a point because I wouldn't want anyone else that I love or know, or even near, to ever know exactly what I feel or what I've been through because I wouldn't wish it on anyone ever. Even the people that aren't particularly nice in the world, I still wouldn't wish it on them because it's not nice. It's not fun.

  But I do think alongside all of the negative, there are positives. I've made lots of friends from those charity events. I've made lifelong friends for as long as their diagnosis will carry them for, that I don't regret any of that. So, although lots of negative things have happened, I try and take the positives from life as well. I've met lots of new people. I'm still here. I have a totally different outlook on life now. I've changed my career to do something that's massively positive and really hopefully helping millions of people across the world. So, although there's negatives, I do believe that the positives that I'm taking from life are also amazing, and I wouldn't have had those opportunities or found those things had my life not have taken the path that it did. So, it's not all bad.

  Mary Parker:

  Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, speaking of which, what would you like people to know who are facing similar diagnoses?

  Lisa Sharp:

  Just always hold on to hope. I know it can seem really hard in the beginning when you're first diagnosed, just having those words said to you by a medical professional, for some people, can be catastrophic. It can literally just flip your whole world on its head. Having them twice in four weeks, I can definitely say it does that. But you have to stay positive, you have to hold out hope that it's going to be okay.

  It may not. No one can ever guarantee you that, but I do believe that positive attitude and strong hope will carry you a part of the way, alongside the medical intervention that obviously is naturally going to have to take place. But you're not alone. There's lots of people out there. There's lots of resources out there. I would be more than happy for anyone anywhere in the world that's associated to Charles River or not, as the case may be, if you need to talk to someone, I would talk to anyone. I would offer my advice, I would offer my ear to listen to. I do think that that's huge. To try and get through something like this alone would be much harder.

  I do think that people should take any help or take any offers of help, or any offers of if you need anything, just give me a call just to chat through, just to get off your chest how you're feeling, or if you're having a particularly bad day during treatment. Just ring someone and say, "Hey, look, I'm having a bit of a rough day today. This is how I'm feeling."

  Sometimes that's just enough to get you through. And then the next day, you can start afresh with a clean outlook and go, "Okay, well today's a brand new day. It might not be as bad as yesterday was. It could be worse, it might be better." But we're not going to know, so you just take that day with an open mind. But yeah, I don't know, just if you can be anything in this world, just be kind.

  Mary Parker:

  That's good advice. Hard to follow, but good advice.

  Lisa Sharp:

  Yeah.

  Mary Parker:

  And on that same note, what sort of practical advice would you give to friends and family of people who are facing this? What did you find most useful for people to say or do?

  Lisa Sharp:

  So you can't really do anything about the physical stuff. You'd love to change places with them and take the hit on some things, especially when you can see how hard the treatment is knocking them down. It is quite hard to keep getting back up. But for me, all I ever really needed from my family was to know that they're there, to know that they loved you, to know that if you needed to reach out to them for anything practical or otherwise, that they were there for you. You can't do anything with the physical stuff, but being there to help ease the mental burden and to share the load is a huge help.

  Just maybe doing a bit of shopping or offering to do washing and ironing, or some of the practical things around the house when they're having a day where they don't feel like they're strong enough to actually do those things. Maybe walking a dog or taking a child to school, or helping out with homework in evening. Just those kinds of things, anything like that that you can do to help, because a lot of the time people are quite proud and too proud to ask for help. So sometimes just doing those subtle things in a small way is helping them without them actually having to sort of, I don't know, bend that personal pride and ask for that help that they desperately need, but don't feel like it's fair to put on someone else.

  Mary Parker:

  It's true. And also it can also just be one more thing to think about. If someone's like, "How can I help?" Then you have to think about, "Oh God, what are you good at? What can you do?" So just taking something and just doing it.

  Lisa Sharp:

  Just turn up at the door with a meal for them or turn up at the door with a bag of nice shopping, maybe some nice treats or some sweet things that maybe just boost the mood, or just in a really weird and sort of soft way, just lets them know that you're thinking about them and that you care and that you're at the forefront of their mind. And it's kind of like a small hug in a weird way, that it just makes you feel like there's people around and people still care, and that's huge.

  Mary Parker:

  Yeah. Just show up and be like, "Get out of my way. I'm cleaning your bathroom. You don't have to talk to me, you don't have to entertain me. I'm going to clean it and I'm going to go."

  Lisa Sharp:

  Yep, exactly that. Yep.

  Mary Parker:

  Yep. All right. Good advice. Good advice. Well, thank you so much, Lisa, for joining us and for sharing your story. These sorts of things are important to talk about. I think that a lot of people don't know exactly what these sort of side effects are like and what the process can be like, so the more people know, the less scary it can be.

  Lisa Sharp:

  Absolutely agree. Thank you very much for having me.

  Mary Parker:

  Thank you for being here.