Consultant surgical oncologist Myles Smith can sometimes hear the echoes of his Galway mentors when he has his patients on the table.

The native of Galway City works at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust features on the Channel 4 documentary, Super Surgeons: A Chance at Life, as he and colleagues treat patients with the rarest and most complex cancers in the world.

He credits the training he received at University Hospital Galway for preparing him for the high-pressure environment he has worked in since 2014, when he joined the team at the sarcoma and skin units at the hospital in Chelsea, London which gets referred patients who have been given little or no hope.

“I think it was Bosco O’Mahoney in Wexford who said there are ghosts in every bed. After a while as you’re walking around the wards you do remember patients you wish things went better with. But you do learn from these things, institutions learn. You always try to do your best,” he reflects.

“Usually, we can make things better. I can still hear my trainers in Galway – Don Courtney, Mark Regan, Ollie McAnena, Denis Quill, Michael Corcoran, Hugh Bredin – I am remembering things they used to say to me as guidance.”

Myles came from a family steeped in the medical world – he has an aunt and an uncle who are psychiatrists, and an uncle who is a pathologist.

While studying medicine in Galway he was immediately drawn to the intense world of surgery.

“After training in Galway I was always interested in cancer and doing surgery as I was seeing it early on in the Regional.”

Caption: Consultant surgical oncologist Myles Smith.

Read the full interview with Myles Smith in this week’s Connacht Tribune, on sale in shops now, or you can download the digital edition from www.connachttribune.ie. You can also download our Connacht Tribune App from Apple’s App Store or get the Android Version from Google Play.