The Things His Father Taught Him

If you had asked me before today, I would have told you that I was beyond being inspired by cancer stories.  There are so many of them, and I have tried to share the ones that have been most meaningful to me with you. But today was different.  Today, Teddy Kennedy Jr. gave the keynote… Continue reading The Things His Father Taught Him

Table for One

We’ve been very busy lately, and so it was 6:30 this evening before the last patient was escorted to the linear accelerator to be treated.  She had had a compression fracture of a lumbar vertebra last week due to metastatic breast cancer, and had been in excruciating pain despite a procedure called a vertebroplasty, where… Continue reading Table for One

A Room With a View

Space is always at a premium in any bustling medical office, and my department is no exception.  In the four years that we’ve been open, the patient volume has nearly doubled.  We’ve added a second physician, a second nurse and several additional radiation therapists.  My office manager does financial counseling in her tiny office that… Continue reading A Room With a View

Let’s Get Physical

In his great book “Cutting For Stone”, Abraham Verghese describes one of his main characters, Dr. Marion Stone, as being obsessed with a certain aspect of the physical exam.  Dr. Stone, as the dictatorial chief of surgery at a major Boston teaching hospital, has drilled into his residents the necessity of performing a rectal exam… Continue reading Let’s Get Physical

The Purple Bathing Suit

“April is the cruelest month”  T.S. Eliot Although I have spent my professional career battling cancer, cancer is not the cruelest disease.  Tonight I was looking through old photographs that my father had taken to a print shop to be scanned on to a disk.  He sent me a copy, but I had not had… Continue reading The Purple Bathing Suit