‘Felt shaken and worried’: Sonia Gandhi’s account of her battle with cancer | Political Pulse News
In a deeply personal account in her memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, Sonia Gandhi has written about the health issues she endured and for the first time, revealed that, in 2010, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and later learnt the malignancy had spread to the pancreas. She underwent two surgeries conducted by world-famous oncologists, the first in Milan, Italy and the second in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
When the malignancy was first detected in 2010, she writes that while she had full confidence in the doctors of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, the media frenzy that would be created in India was one reason she decided to go abroad. She writes, “I felt shaken and worried, there was no time to lose, my children and I were told, and my mind began to race to a possible scary outcome…I wasn’t keen to be at the centre of a media frenzy that would have inevitably accompanied a surgery in Delhi…True I had become a public figure, but did that mean I wasn’t to be allowed even a modicum of privacy?”
After the first surgery, Sonia recalls how the surgeon, Dr Veronesi, immediately informed her that everything had gone on well and there were no residues. Her account: “He had removed two tumours, including a non-suspicious one to be on the safe side, and conducted an intra-operative radiation to spare me five weeks of radiotherapy.”
The memoir also contains details of how just one year later, in 2011, during routine follow-up tests, a growth was detected in the pancreas. “This came as a shock to me and the children—we immediately thought it was a flare-up of the earlier problem. Following many consultations, my doctors felt I needed immediate surgery… I was agitated and worried about the operation despite everyone’s assurances, since the actual extent of the disease could only be determined after the surgery. My mind began to dwell on a worst-case scenario. What if it turned out to be a metastatic growth? Would I come through it?…”
She later narrates how the second surgery in Rotterdam was performed by Dr Casper van Eijck and after it, Dr van Eijck explained to her that she had been fortunate since the tumour was found to be in a preliminary stage, having been detected early. She stayed in the hospital for four weeks, with mostly Priyanka by her side. After her return to Delhi, she recalls how she found herself weakened by the long second surgery she had endured, but also how fortunate she was that both times, she had been saved from undergoing chemotherapy.
