Unfinished business pushes Patten back to campaign trail

Fiona Patten isn’t walking away from politics just yet— instead she’s found a way to help others after her cancer scare.

Speaking from her hospital bed just one month after her shock cancer diagnosis,Fiona Patten is gearing up for a return to the campaign trail. Picture: Tony Gough

Fiona Patten says she has far too much unfinished business to walk away from politics just yet.

Speaking from her hospital bed just one month after her shock cancer diagnosis, the political trailblazer is gearing up for a return to the campaign trail in the coming days ahead of next month’s election. Speaking for the first time since undergoing surgery to remove one of her kidneys, Ms Patten revealed there was a point where she thought her parliamentary career may be over.

“That certainly went through my mind,” she said. “Between having the CT scan and the biopsy, we didn’t know whether it had spread, we didn’t know if there was more, and in that time, you think about that stuff, but I knew I didn’t want to leave (politics) because I certainly feel like I’ve got more work to do.”

The Reason Party leader plans to use the scare to advocate for the government to expand the services of nurse practitioners and pharmacists in a bid to free up GPs and help more people receive early diagnoses.

MP Fiona Patten recovering in hospital after having her kidney taken out following a cancer scare. Robbie Swan. Picture: Tony Gough

It took just four weeks from Ms Patten’s first visit to the GP – after discovering blood in the urine – to having her kidney removed in a four-hour operation.

She only went to the doctor because of the “peer pressure” from a staff member, who insisted she get it checked out.

That check-up saved her life.

“The doctor said it could be a urinary tract infection, or the only other thing is cancer and we both kind of laughed that off and said, ‘yeah right’,” she recalled.

“She then rang me the next day and said, ‘would you mind popping in?’, and I said ‘yeah, when do you want to see me?’ and she said, ‘it doesn’t matter, you just come in and I’ll see you’, and at that point I thought, f--k it is cancer.

“It’s the most awful thing. It’s terrible to hear that you have cancer. You just think that’s it. It’s an incredibly frightening thing and you are completely helpless.”

Luckily, the cancer was caught before it could spread anywhere and Ms Patten was given a good prognosis.

“We must think outside the box, which is why we need to be looking at where other health professionals can play a role in expanding who can offer primary care. If that opens up a couple of appointments for a GP to see someone like me, early on, that will save someone’s life,” she said.

Fiona Patten of the Reason Party asks a question in the Victorian Upper House. Picture: Ian Currie

“If I hadn’t got that early detection and early diagnosis, I could have been facing something very different. This could have been a lot worse.”

While initially hesitant to go public because of stigma often associated with illness, Ms Patten revealed her diagnosis in the hopes of sparking a conversation.

“One of my heroes in all of this, for many reasons, is Olivia Newton-John. She talked about her cancer and that helped other people talk about theirs,” Ms Patten said.

“People don’t want to talk about if they’re struggling health-wise because they feel like they’ll be judged or seen as weak. That went through my mind a lot. I’m in the middle of an election campaign and I thought ‘are people not going to vote for me because I’ve got cancer?’

“But when one in two of us will get cancer, there shouldn’t be shame and there shouldn’t be stigma.”

With a likely clean bill of health and a positive prognosis, Ms Patten says she is ready to fight to reclaim her spot in Victoria’s upper house

“It’s not going to affect my work. I have some unfinished business to do. I’ve got no intentions of slowing down.”