Breast cancer survivor on folly of ‘Asian way’ of hiding illnesses after aunts failed to share own diagnoses
- Kim Li was furious none of her father’s sisters shared an important detail of her family’s medical history that could have spared her much suffering
- She says hiding your illness because of shame might be the Asian way, but it could mean a missed opportunity to save a loved one
On a sunny afternoon in October last year, Hong Kong-born Kim Li could not have anticipated how her world would be turned upside down when her 14-year-old daughter Priya came home from school in tears, having discovered her school friend had just found a lump in her breast.
Li, a former science teacher at Hong Kong’s King George V School who was now teaching at Northampton High School in the UK, was used to dealing with teenage upsets. But as she tried to comfort her daughter, Li couldn’t shake the nagging worry about the lump in her own breast, which she had been ignoring for over a month.
That same evening while chatting in bed, Li asked her physician husband Bharath Lakkappa to feel the lump. She knew he would put her mind at ease if he said it was nothing. After he felt it, however, her husband became quiet. He turned off the light and said: “We need to ring the GP tomorrow.”
The following morning the doctor made a referral for Li to see a specialist, and on November 13 she went to the breast screening department at Northampton Hospital. Within minutes of his examination the specialist said he was “highly suspicious” and Li was sent to have a mammogram and breast ultrasound, where a biopsy was taken.
