When I was young and foolish, or very smart depending on your perspective, I married a man who is five and a half years older than me. When my husband was my age (and never trust a woman who will tell you her age, but between you and me I am 58), he started to… Continue reading Perspective
Category: Philosophy of cancer
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
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
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
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?
Cancer is Not a Lifestyle
I’m not sure when I stopped being merely opinionated, and became a true curmudgeon. But I think it was about the same time that medical students started telling me that radiation oncology is one of the “lifestyle” specialties in medicine. According to the National Resident Matching Program, this year radiation oncology ranked 5th on the… Continue reading Cancer is Not a Lifestyle
If Wishes Were Horses
For Missy Is there any woman alive who can’t recite the old nursery rhyme “If wishes were horses,then beggars would ride”? The line is etched into the memory of every little girl who ever wanted a pony, but its true lineage dates back to James Carmichael’s Proverbs of Scots circa 1628 when the original read … Continue reading If Wishes Were Horses
The Golden Rules of Cancer
Rule # 1: I didn’t give you your cancer so be nice to me. And the corollary: Rule # 2: You didn’t give you your cancer so be nice to yourself. I believe that in dealing with cancer, it helps to play by the rules. The first rule means that as angry as you are… Continue reading The Golden Rules of Cancer
Fire and Ice
“Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice…..” Robert Frost Sometimes there is a very fine line between doing too much, and not doing enough. I have been thinking about this lately as I watch patients go through radiation therapy. It’s not just the acute side effects that worry me with… Continue reading Fire and Ice
Nana
When I was ten years old, there were only two things in life that I loved beyond question: horses and my Nana. Nana, whose real name was Jenny Silver, was my maternal grandmother. She and my grandfather, known of course as Papa, lived in Augusta, Georgia on a tree shaded street in the true heart… Continue reading Nana