“We don’t always save patient’s lives, but that fight for a mother to live a month to see her daughter graduate has become everything that makes me persevere and to keep pushing on.

Dr Tshepiso Choma is a medical officer in the medical oncology department at Steve Biko Academic Hospital, and she’s an aspiring oncologist. She treats patients with cancers of any organ system, referred to their facility. She is a junior lecturer — rendering lectures and practical tutorials to undergraduate medical students on various subjects of oncology — and also assists with clinical trials that are conducted in the department, with a research focus that is aimed at the advancement of cancer treatment.

Love Life’s messaging exposed and sensitised her to the need for improved healthcare, particularly having grown up in Soweto, where the healthcare challenges far supersede the resources available. Choma notes that one of the big challenges is life planning — for instance, having children and maintaining a functional work-life balance without compromising one’s career goals.

After completing a gruelling two years of internship at Chris Hani Baragwaneth and a frustrating community service year at a district level hospital in Pretoria, she found a post in medical oncology. Two months later and she was absolutely enamoured with this discipline, which she had had very little exposure to as an undergraduate student and as a newly qualified clinician.

Choma has plans to complete a specialisation programme that will see her qualify as a clinical oncologist. Then she will be able to engage in more clinical research on a topic close to her heart: breast cancer in the young black women.

“We don’t always save patient’s lives, but that fight for a mother to live a month to see her daughter graduate has become everything that makes me persevere and to keep pushing on.

“As a young girl growing up in a township, my parents sacrificed everything to ensure that I received the best education in my foundation phase. This phenomenal gift allowed me to be confident, it gave me perspective to dream and imagine myself outside of the reality of my socioeconomic environment, it gave me the audacity to occupy spaces that were unimaginable for a little black girl,” she says.

— Welcome Lishivha

Twitter: @dr_mrs_choma