Latest Voices

I enjoy working with adolescents and young adults who are in treatment for addiction because, despite their vulnerability, they are at an age where interventions have a reasonably high chance of being successful. Their genetic risk for addiction is something they cannot change, but they can modify their overall risk by changing their environment and carefully choosing their friends.

It was his first visit to a hospital–any hospital–since his birth in this one eighty years earlier, and the trip to the emergency department for blood in the urine soon escalated into a workup for bladder cancer. He became one of the most memorable patients of my medical school experience and, for that matter, my entire career.

Though so crotchety that some of the staff avoided him whenever possible, he and I always got along well.

I grew up on a farm in Connecticut, went to college in Rhode Island, and have lived my entire adult life in small-town Vermont, so the mores of rural New England are deeply engrained in me.

That means Robert Frost’s poetry is part of my vernacular. (I own two hardcover copies of You Come Too, a collection of his most popular poems: one copy was printed the year I turned ten and bears my name on the flyleaf in childish script;

In late fall of 2020, rumors were buzzing around the hospital where I worked about a possible retirement buyout package. My supervisor and I sat in our large conference room discussing what we had heard. I said, “If the offer is decent, I will probably accept the package. I don’t want to work until I’m carried off the unit on a stretcher.” Then, with my usual humor, I chuckled and added, “I tried that once and it didn’t turn out so good.”

Years ago, on my first rotation as a third-year medical student, I received a dreaded phone call. My father had arrived home late one night after work. As he entered the house, he tumbled down the stairs. His physician, worried that my dad had suffered a mini-stroke, ordered an ultrasound of the carotid arteries in the neck.

Most people aren’t aware of a cancer that is ruthless above the rest. This cancer lasts a lifetime and never fully remits.

I first became aware that I was susceptible as a child. I was on an examining table and our pediatrician asked my mother to step outside the room. I then heard him berating her: “This child is sunburned! How could you! You know you have genetic skin cancer!”

She was my head nurse on a treatment unit for psychiatric patients. In the course of our work we became as close as sisters. When she developed breast cancer with heavy spread into the lymph nodes, I was devastated but not surprised. She lit one cigarette from the last one throughout those days before smoking was banned.

I knew it was coming.

After my morning walk, I sat down and ran my fingers through my hair, and ended up with a handful. Right on schedule, Day 14 following my first chemo treatment for stage lll inflammatory breast cancer.

Taking what remained of my shoulder-length hair and cutting off what I could with a pair of scissors, I noticed how much I looked like my dad, now that my features, rather than my hair, took center stage. Then my husband shaved off what remained as I sat on an overturned Home Depot bucket in our backyard.