Ten years after a breast surgeon returned to Dubai to practice medicine, a colleague approached her in a hospital corridor with an unexpected compliment: “It’s great — since you came back, I no longer see those advanced cases of breast cancer.”
The surgeon admitted she hadn’t noticed the change herself. “You get on the wheel,” she explained during an interview for our research. Returning home after training abroad means more than just resuming a career—it means running clinics, training nurses, and traveling to remote areas to educate women’s groups. It means designing educational materials that teach breast self-examination without showing a breast, because censors won’t allow it. It means advocating for the word “breast” to appear on medical licenses, even though authorities prefer the term “chest.”
Her efforts didn’t stop there. She established a support group, then a drop-in center—the likely only cancer drop-in center in the Middle East. Amid these initiatives, she fundamentally altered what late-stage breast cancer looks like in her country.
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