Category: Patient Stories

Weights and Measures

The sudden illness of a colleague is always a shocking surprise.  As physicians, we are trained from an early age to ignore our own infirmities in the service of others.  Apart from my three C-sections, I have been extremely fortunate in terms of my own health—I can count the number of sick days I’ve taken… Continue reading Weights and Measures

Denial Redux

Today I saw a new breast cancer patient in clinic.  She was a lovely lady of 64, who had retired last year from her job as a special education teacher.  Her medical history had been unremarkable until last November when she began to gain weight inexplicably.  She was also short of breath, but did not… Continue reading Denial Redux

Denial Is Not a River in Egypt

If you desire healing, let yourself fall ill let yourself fall ill.” ― Rumi Yesterday I saw a patient—an 80 year old woman with metastatic cancer involving her bones.  She had near complete replacement of her twelfth thoracic vertebra by tumor, and also significant destruction of her fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae, demonstrated by PET-CT… Continue reading Denial Is Not a River in Egypt

Thanks For Your Support

My husband likes to say, “No good deed goes unpunished.”  I don’t always agree, but sometimes you just can’t argue that concept.  One of my favorite patients, a forty nine year old woman who I treated for head and neck cancer a year ago is a good case in point. Head and neck cancer is… Continue reading Thanks For Your Support

Don’t Let Me Talk You Into It

When I was young and foolish and just starting out in my career, I found it very hard to take “NO” for an answer.  If a patient needed radiation therapy, and he or she didn’t want to have it, I did my very best to talk that patient into it.   I have always been a… Continue reading Don’t Let Me Talk You Into It

Deep in the Heart of Texas

One of the things I have learned since starting this blog last September is how many doctors enjoy telling their stories, and how many of them do it very well.  Dr. Kevin Pho is an internal medicine physician in New Hampshire who started a website where he brings together many voices of medicine—doctors, patients, educators… Continue reading Deep in the Heart of Texas

How Old is Too Old?

Yesterday I saw a 90 year old woman in consultation.  She presented to the emergency room in September with abdominal pain, and in the process of working her up, a chest X-ray was taken which showed an infiltrate in her lingula, part of the left lower lobe of her lung.  As it turned out, there… Continue reading How Old is Too Old?

What Comes Next?

Multi-tasking has never been my forte and so I like to keep my schedule organized.  Mondays, I see all of my on-treatment patients.  Tuesdays and Thursdays I see new patients in consultation.  Wednesdays are reserved for treatment planning and research projects.  But Fridays—well, Fridays are usually the best day of the week.  Not only is… Continue reading What Comes Next?

There Comes a Time

Written while returning from my Galapagos trip, posting now. It’s happening—the moment that we all dread as we age, that point in time where we realize that we are becoming our parents.  When I was a child, my father was a busy man, completing his residency in plastic surgery, establishing a practice, climbing the academic… Continue reading There Comes a Time