Richard Scolyer

She went to uni at some stage, so she must have known what uni life was like.

It was the first time I'd lived away from home, living at college.

It was so much fun.

Some of my best mates now are people that I met at college.

And ones that I haven't seen for some time have reached out to me this year, which has been very special and to reminisce about some of the crazy things that we got up to.

Well, I didn't know what I was going to do initially.

I think I ended up working for five years in clinical medicine, which is much longer than most people who go into pathology.

The first year when you qualify, you're called an intern and you rotate around different jobs.

And every term I did, I wanted to be a specialist in that field.

I wanted to work in emergency medicine, in cardiology, gastroenterology.

many, many other things.

And this continued on for some years.

But in the end, I'd give it a crack, see if I like doing it.

Yeah, there's different types of pathologists.

So the area that I work in, it's called anatomical or tissue pathology.

So if people have a biopsy that's taken from them,

then the surgeon or the GP or the dermatologist, whoever takes the biopsy, it's sent to get a diagnosis.

And that's the principal role of a pathologist to examine a piece of tissue under a microscope.

And if it turns out that it is a cancer, then there's a whole lot of features that the pathologist has to assess and that determines whether

what's called the stage of the disease and also a variety of prognostic factors to see if it's a good or bad cancer, if you like.