The other day I was sitting in morning conference and one of my colleagues walks in wearing scrubs. I have no idea why he was wearing scrubs because we are not surgeons, but I assume he had been doing some procedure in the OR. Now this particular man is short in stature, but huge in… Continue reading Men in Scrubs
Month: October 2012
Dammit Janet
There is cancer. And then there is CANCER. The first refers to the ones we discover early, excise completely and move on—a tiny rent in the whole fabric of a life, easily mended or patched but never quite forgotten. But the second, CANCER in capital letters—these are the ones that can never be discovered early… Continue reading Dammit Janet
My Front Man
My front man is a woman. I learned the value of a front man in a radiation therapy department when I was a resident, and the front man Paul was a man who greeted one hundred and fifty patients a day with a smile and a word of encouragement. The actual sex of the front man… Continue reading My Front Man
Have You Done Your Sexual Harassment Training Yet?
The bureaucrats finally caught up with me. When you work for the state, even if you’re a university medical center employee, not a bona fide government worker who puts the phone on voice mail and spends the rest of the day saying “that’s not in my job description”, there are just certain things you have… Continue reading Have You Done Your Sexual Harassment Training Yet?
Bad Tidings We Bring
Yesterday was one of those bad days at work. With my resident, I had seen a patient in consultation a week ago, a very nice man with an evil cancer—metastatic malignant melanoma—who had been referred for post-operative radiation therapy. We were waiting for another test to be done which would help us with our radiation… Continue reading Bad Tidings We Bring
Men Who Stare At Goats
Fifteen years ago, I had a patient who was crazy. He called himself the Red Baron, and drove a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado around town, red with the biggest tailfins you ever saw. He wore a scarf, and goggles, and smiled and waved at everyone he passed on the road. Everyone knew he was a few… Continue reading Men Who Stare At Goats
Hunger Strike
The Q’s will not eat. My two female deerhound sisters, Queen and Quicksilver, aka Quibbets and Little Grey, are coming four years old in January. They are both AKC Grand Champions and as such, I have not spayed them yet, thinking that perhaps I will breed a litter, my first since my only prior litter… Continue reading Hunger Strike
You Play Hardball, Kid
Whenever I have a female medical student, as I did today, I always catch them looking at a framed cartoon on my desk and smiling. The cartoon is an original hand lettered Doonesbury strip by Garry Trudeau, and it is indeed larger than life, each section about five by four inches. If you look closely,… Continue reading You Play Hardball, Kid
How Do I Know This is Working?
This is the question I get asked the most: “So Doc, how do I know that this is working?” Sometimes my patients come to me with visible or palpable disease—something on the skin that they can see fading away, an enlarged lymph node in the neck that shrinks visibly during treatment, a lump or a… Continue reading How Do I Know This is Working?
Fight On!
Several years ago my second child, a very gregarious son, applied for college. We were hoping of course that he would join the ranks of the Ivy League, but barring that, a merit scholarship to one of the wonderful University of California schools would have pleased us greatly. But my son had other ideas. He,… Continue reading Fight On!