People often ask how my clinic, Clinique Medic Elle began, expecting a story about business plans or inspiration boards. The truth is simpler and more human. It began with fear, intuition, and the smallest act of self-preservation that grew into something larger than I could have imagined. It feels fitting to tell it now, in honour of Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
The beginning of my clinic traces back to a single moment in a doctor’s office, the kind that quietly rearranges your sense of safety. During a routine annual checkup, my doctor felt a lump in my breast. I had been careful ever since my mother’s breast cancer diagnosis, keeping my yearly appointments the way some people keep prayer, out of both faith and fear.
He told me it was probably just a cyst, that familiar word physicians use to soften uncertainty. But intuition can be loud when something is wrong. Fear began to rise, silent but undeniable, a tide you cannot talk yourself out of.
Before heading to Clarke Radiology for the ultrasound, I stopped for coffee. It was my ritual when anxiety took hold. My coffee was my liquid courage, a small comfort that reminded me life could still feel ordinary. Holding that warm cup made me feel anchored, even as the ground beneath me began to tilt.
Clarke Radiology was the opposite of comfort. The waiting room felt sterile and impersonal, more concerned with procedure than people. The receptionist looked at my cup with suspicion and told me coffee was not allowed because it might yellow the grout. I remember thinking how strange it was that in a place devoted to diagnosis and healing, the grout mattered more than the person holding the cup.
When I finally saw the doctor, I was still trembling. He noticed the tears on my cheeks and looked at me with a mix of confusion and impatience, as if fear were a behaviour to correct rather than a human reaction. His detachment stung. It was not cruelty, but absence, the kind of absence that makes you realize how much compassion has gone missing from medicine.
Everything was fine, but the experience haunted me. Out of that disquiet came the first spark of what would become my clinic.
What if care could feel different? What if a clinic could be built around warmth instead of walls, where no one was made to feel foolish for being afraid, or for needing a moment with their coffee before facing whatever came next?
That is how my clinic began. Not from ambition or strategy, but from a small act of defiance, a refusal to let care become cold out of fear, yes, but also from a deep belief that healing should feel human.
That belief became the foundation of Clinique Medic Elle, a place where compassion is as essential as medicine, and where the people will always matter more than the grout.
