Latest Voices

Every second Wednesday of the month we met on Zoom, five of my medical colleagues and I, for more than a year. We started off sharing fun facts. She spoke of her bike rides—how fast she could go, how beautiful the fall leaves were, how fresh the forest air smelled, how spring brought a veil of green.

We also discussed the differences between a doctor’s approach and a scientist’s approach to teaching students and residents in a hospital setting. We provoked each other. We enjoyed the intellectual challenge that faced

Her breath rasped, heavy, traveling all the way from an ICU in India to my ear pressed to the phone in Yonkers, New York. My mom’s best friend, her cousin, was dying far away from me. She had been like a mom to me.

Her sister had put the phone to her ear so that I could speak to her. She was unconscious for the most part, her body ravaged with cancer, her systems shutting down, one by one.

Keep a green tree in your heart and a singing bird will come. –Chinese Proverb

Spring folds into summer like origami. My vegetable garden thrives. Potted flowers stretch toward the sun. Wildflowers, I seeded in March, burst forth in a colorful display that attracts bees. The yard hums with activity.

All this appreciation for the beauty of the natural world is tempered by my health. I have a blood cancer, multiple myeloma. The disease environment in which I live comes with complications. Some days I am awkward and self conscious as an adolescent. My skin mottles in ugly blotches, my

The words I heard most often from my mother are, “It’s not what you get in life, it’s how you handle what you get.” These words have shaped my life and become the essence of what I believe.

My mother faced so many challenges in her life: the birth of a severely autistic child in the era of blaming mothers for that diagnosis; breast cancer resulting in a mastectomy; a wayward husband and divorce; a serious hand injury following an automobile accident. But somehow she managed to keep her jealousy of others at bay and appreciate her own joys in

It’s 1971 and we are in a green-tinted hospital waiting room, half-sterile, half-filled with sawhorses, wood planks, a drill, sitting in attached sickness-colored plastic chairs. My aunt–my father’s sister, whose ability to exclude herself from experiences by analyzing everyone else has diminished during this mutual terror–is at my right. Her long and elegant fingers cover my own. My younger sister, then brother, mother and older sister are to my left. We wait. It is the eternity of waiting for bad news while hoping for good.

The surgeon enters, scrubs matching walls. He lifts a hand and motions my mother to come

I considered the idea of survival only when I found out, postsurgery, that the cancer had spread to my lymph nodes. I wondered what would have happened had I waited any longer, had I ignored going to the hospital to follow up about the lump on my breast.

“I am grateful for witnessing your courage, your strength is inspiring, your wisdom is eternal, and you are not alone”: These words, written on a paper heart with irises around it, sit on my desk. I feel fortunate to be a behavioral health clinician, providing therapy to patients with cancer who are undergoing radiation at Stanford’s Cancer Center.

I never told my father that his physicians had diagnosed him with pancreatic cancer. Since he was ninety-eight years old, I decided that telling him would only cause him profound mental and emotional anguish—a fear that would diminish however long he had to live but would not alter the reality. To have Dad endure rounds of chemotherapy or radiation at his age would also be physically cruel.

Most of all, I did not tell Dad because not even the doctors were one-hundred percent certain of their diagnosis.

For months, Dad had experienced attacks that left him light-headed and disoriented. By