“I want them to live again to the point where pain becomes art.” Lawrence Durrell, “Justine” I have always loved masks. Near sighted likely from birth, a fact which was discovered significantly later, I never minded stumbling around our neighborhood on Halloween, my already deficient depth perception further stunted by my Bugs Bunny mask. To… Continue reading A Different Kind of Mask
Tag: Radiation Oncology
The Good Books
Where I come from, when most people refer to The Good Book, they are referring to the Bible. This is not true for my father, because to him, the Good Books are something else entirely. He describes a scene early in his career as a plastic surgeon, when he had taken his doting mother to… Continue reading The Good Books
When Age is a Relative Thing
I remember when I was a medical student and an elderly patient would be admitted to the surgical service through the emergency room with a bowel obstruction, or a lung cancer, or blockage in the coronary arteries so severe that only a coronary bypass could save him. The students and residents would gather around the… Continue reading When Age is a Relative Thing
Happy Birthday To Me
Ex-marines are some of the toughest patients I ever see, when it comes to dealing with pain from cancer. And CAREER ex-Marines have the market cornered on toughness. Take for example, an elderly friend in Kansas who woke up one morning with severe upper back pain, feeling faint, and decided as was his Marine Corps… Continue reading Happy Birthday To Me
The Way I See It
When it comes to surgery for cancer, having a “positive margin” is a bad thing. It means that when the surgeon said he “got it all,” even though he meant it with all of his heart, likely he didn’t. For a woman undergoing a lumpectomy for breast cancer, that positive margin means a re-excision of… Continue reading The Way I See It
The Techno-Freak in Me
At home, I have trouble working the audio-visual system. A few years ago, my husband bought a television set for our family room with a huge screen, for better sports and movie viewing. Gradually components were added on—a surround sound system, the keyboard to stream video from Netflix, the standard DVD player, and, a gift… Continue reading The Techno-Freak in Me
Just Trying To Keep The Customer Satisfied
The institution that employs me is very bullish on customer satisfaction. Having come from a fourteen year stint in private practice before I came back into the University fold six years ago, the little things that make a practice run smoothly come naturally to me. Patients are typically seen within a week of the consultation… Continue reading Just Trying To Keep The Customer Satisfied
The Face Of Hope
With special thanks to Dr. Dingle Spence. Thirty three years ago my husband and I went to Jamaica for a belated honeymoon. We got married on the last weekend of my internship year, and immediately flew back to Boston for me to start my second year of internal medicine training. Seven months later in the… Continue reading The Face Of Hope
When Life Gives You Lemons
When I was about ten years old, swimming on a Texas swim team, I remember hearing that the child of one of the local coaches had been diagnosed with leukemia. The idea of a kid dying of an untreatable disease was so foreign to me that I am sure that I have blocked out most… Continue reading When Life Gives You Lemons
Who We Really Are
When I was a resident in radiation oncology, I thought I already knew a lot about medicine. After all, I had just completed an internal medicine residency, and had taken and passed my boards. Needless to say, I was more than a little bit irritated the first time a patient “coded” in the radiation therapy… Continue reading Who We Really Are