Paramedic Elizabeth Branagan back to work as she battles cancer
She’s a standout star in the reality TV show Ambulance Australia but had to take some time off after being diagnosed with cancer. Now paramedic Elizabeth ‘Biffie’ Branagan has just returned to work — but her medical battle is far from over.
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Elizabeth Branagan returned to work last Wednesday, minus her “third boob” — what the Sydney paramedic jokingly nicknamed a tumour in her chest that turned out to be non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
She is also minus her luxurious locks thanks to six rounds of chemotherapy but on the plus side she has a clean bill of health and a renewed empathy for her patients, especially those who go through chemotherapy.
“It really sucked, it was awful. I anticipated since I was young and relatively healthy that I would recover after each round but I ended up in hospital twice with sepsis and needed blood transfusions it was absolutely miserable,” Ms Branagan said.
Biffie, as she is affectionately known to her friends, is one of the stars of Ambulance Australia, which returns to Channel 10 today at 7.30pm.
Earlier this year, while filming the second series, she was unaware of the cancer that was growing inside her until serious chest pain led to scans and the diagnosis.
“You’re not human, you have no time to recover before the next lot … you are overwhelmed by poisons in your body, the mouth ulcers, the nausea and the vomiting and the fatigue and the racing hearts and dizziness,” she said.
“I didn’t even have enough strength to have a shower.”
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Ms Branagan said she got to the point where she actually thought of giving up.
“I was really run down and if they said the treatment wasn’t working I just would have happily given up chemo,” she said.
“I almost wanted to stop after five rounds, I did not want to do the sixth rounds and I was crying in my doctor’s office for an hour and he convinced me to do the last round.
“Now I’m so glad I went thought with it.”
When The Sunday Telegraph spoke to her back in April, at the beginning of her chemo, she dreaded the loss of her hair and the “feminine girly stuff” and she was worried about “feeling ugly”.
“It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be,” she said.
“I’ve been bald for six months now and I am starting to grow hair back which is great, because the sicker you get, the worse you look, the dark circles under eyes and you’re really pale, I felt like Voldemort, really freaky-looking.
“Now I’m starting to get the feminine stuff back like my eyelashes and my eyebrows and starting to feel a bit more like me.
“My hair is growing back dark but I have a blonde wig now because I was too pale, too washed out for a dark wig,” Ms Branagan said.
During her darkest hours, the light at the end of the tunnel was getting back to the job she loves.
“I remembered the end game, to get back to work and I did last week and it was great,” she said.
“We had a stabbing and that reminded me why we do this job, this guy was crook and we got to use our skills and I was just rapt to be back in the thick of it again.
“The empathy I have now, I can just relate so much more to people’s pain levels after the procedures.
“With chemo patients I’ll just be: ‘Oh my god, horrendous, keep your chin up’ but there is a light a the end of the tunnel.”
Sadly on Friday a scan showed the cancer was back in her spleen and right armpit, but Biffie refuses to let it get her down.
She now has hopes to get on a Car-T cell immunotherapy trial running out of St Vincent’s Hospital. Car-T cell immunotherapy uses the body’s own immune cells re-engineered to target the specific cancer cells.
‘I’ll keep working until I know more but that is what they have recommended,” she said.