Tag: breast cancer

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

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?

The Things They Put on Their Skin

When patients start their radiation therapy, one of the side effects that we tell them to look for is a skin reaction.  Depending on the area of the body treated, and the dose given, the skin reaction at the end of treatment ranges anywhere from a mild sunburned look all the way to what we… Continue reading The Things They Put on Their Skin

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

Atonement

At one of the boarding and training stables where I took riding lessons, there was a custom passed down through generations of instructors and eager children.  If a horse managed to unseat a young rider, the slightly bruised and dirty little victim was allowed to pull a few strands of said horse’s tail.  The instructor… Continue reading Atonement

Cancer is a Word, Not a Sentence

I am the one who doesn’t like to fast forward during the commercials.  While others get up from the couch for a bathroom break, to grab a beer, take a phone call, or interrupt our programming to discuss the new season of whichever show we happen to be watching, I sit riveted to the screen.… Continue reading Cancer is a Word, Not a Sentence

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

Who Wants to be First?

After much preparation, we opened our new radiation therapy department in September 2008.  Many many elements and “players” had to come together to produce a new state of the art community cancer center.  No detail was overlooked– the existing space had to be renovated  to create a more “zen-like” work flow and feel; the front… Continue reading Who Wants to be First?