At her home in the UK, writer and medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris has spent the past couple of months suspended in uncertainty after a breast-cancer diagnosis in August threw everything into turmoil.
Earlier this year, she released her book The Facemaker, about Kiwi surgeon Harry Gillies’ groundbreaking work on World War I soldiers whose faces were so badly damaged that their features sometimes weren’t there at all.
Fitzharris spent years reading diaries, archives and medical notes, sourcing permission from families to talk about the men whom Gillies so profoundly affected. Fitzharris, who holds a PhD in the history of science and medicine from the University of Oxford and is the writer and host of the Smithsonian Channel series The Curious Life and Death of …, was fully into the swing of promotion for the book. She had interviews and media appearances lined up for the rest of the year when she found a lump in her breast.
She immediately went to get it checked out. It wasn’t cancer – but doctors found a lump next to it that was.
It is, at least, early stage. Fitzharris says
