cancer Archives - Page 4 of 13

Miraculous Recovery

Alexandra Lackey January 11, 2019 14 Comments

Alexandra Lackey ~

During my third year of medical school, I completed a clinical rotation in surgery. I was certain that it would be horrible. I envisioned myself in the OR, getting lightheaded, passing out onto the sterile field and being yelled at by my attending physician. I worried that the medical knowledge I’d worked so hard to learn would be neglected in favor of memorizing the steps of surgical procedures. My parents, who are both physicians, warned that I’d just be holding retractors for hours.

I want to interact with my patients, I fretted, not just hover over them while they’re anesthetized.

Although I tried to keep an open mind, I knew that I was destined for a miserable time.

Hunting

Scott Newport November 23, 2018 12 Comments

Scott Newport ~

“Seriously?” began Amy’s text, which popped up on my iPhone one blustery November morning.

“How do you know?” she went on. “Why don’t I feel him with me?”

I had no idea how to answer.

Remembering the Beginning

Jacqueline Dooley November 16, 2018 8 Comments

Jacqueline Dooley ~

I was unprepared
for the feel of your hair pulling free
with every brushstroke.
I wasn’t up to autumn
from the side of your hospital bed.
It seemed too much
for the universe to ask.
But, like you, I was choiceless
as I drove through November streets
the colors, drained and faded,
like your face when the chemo went in,
reduced to nothing more
than what I was when you were born.
I covered your exposed head.
I tried to stop your tears.

Sick of Being Sick

Ryan Nesbit November 2, 2018 8 Comments

Ryan Nesbit ~

From second through fifth grade, I mastered the art of being sick. I got out of school, soccer practice and piano lessons so that I could be the child I wanted to be–not sick, but loved, cared for.

Here was my recipe:

1. Wake up.
2. Feel anxious about the day to come (this was natural).
3. Let the anxiety morph into a sickly pallor.

A Survival Guide to Chemo and Radiation

Lynn Lazos October 19, 2018 7 Comments

Lynn Lazos ~

Chemotherapy and radiation are not pleasant experiences, but knowing how to handle them can make your life a whole lot easier.

I had my first mammogram at age thirty-five, and for the next thirty-five years I had mammograms regularly. On my way, I’d pass the entrance to the Thomas Johns Cancer Hospital, outside of Richmond, VA, never thinking that I’d one day cross that threshold myself.

Cushioning the Fall

Meghan G. Liroff April 27, 2018 14 Comments

Meghan G. Liroff ~

Angela Harris has been here in the hospital for six hours, awaiting the results of her CAT scan. I won’t take responsibility for all of that wait time: complicated CAT scans and labs do take a significant amount of time to perform. But she didn’t need to wait the last hour.

She was waiting on me–her emergency physician–because I needed to confirm her cancer diagnosis with radiology, arrange some oncology follow-up…and find the most appropriate phraseology for “You have stage IV cancer, but you don’t meet admission criteria.”

falling leaves

Barbara Kaufmann November 24, 2017 No Comments

Fighting the Odds

Evelyn Lai November 10, 2017 18 Comments

Evelyn Lai ~

Monday

I walk into your room in the pediatric intensive-care unit as two nurses are repositioning you. Your parents stand nearby–your dad in his frayed baseball cap and khaki cargo shorts; your mom, her baggy jeans wrinkled with the same worry as the lines near her eyes. Your little sister sits near the window with a blue hospital mask over her mouth, hugging her knees; Grandma sits snug beside her, back straight and hair done, expression cordial.

You are a fifteen-year-old boy with leukemia who came into our emergency department last week with fevers, but spiraled quickly into septic shock with multiorgan failure.

Erasure

Thomas Nguyen September 1, 2017 4 Comments

Thomas Nguyen ~

Consider what remains: chipped yellow
paint, roman candles, wilted gardenias,
so many photographs. Accept that

time makes things distant, that his
absence doesn’t bleed into your memories
as much as it used to. Try harder and

harder to remember the last time
you saw him, cords wrapped around
his legs like snakes, all white

and black, hidden underneath
neatly-pressed khakis. And my melanomas,
he once showed you, with a smile.

cancer center sidewalk

John Scarlett September 1, 2017 No Comments

Mirror

Karen Arscott August 17, 2017 No Comments

As I drove home after seeing my CT scan, I thought about how I could avoid telling anyone my diagnosis. It would be easy, I figured. I would wait until I had written confirmation of what I had seen. A few days passed, and I was able to maintain the deception–I loved acting, and this was an easy role for me, as protector of my family.

When the radiology report arrived, I felt like I was reading a report about one of my patients: “…suggestive of malignancy,” it said. I kept looking at the name and birthdate–yes, this was my report. Thus began my path down the rough road of lung cancer.

Matching Rings

Joy Liu June 16, 2017 8 Comments

Joy Liu

The room is stuffy, but the woman is shivering.

Her husband stands by her bedside. An interpreter that they’ve hired to stay with her day and night stands at the foot of the bed. And then there’s me, the doctor (I’m an intern), waiting to deliver one of many sad speeches I must give today.

Smiling wanly, she struggles into a sitting position and shakes my hand.

Even with a diagnosis of metastatic stomach cancer, she has movie-star looks. She’s only twenty-six–the same age as me. I can imagine her stepping out of a red-carpet premiere in Shanghai. Instead, having hired personal interpreters and taken a flight halfway across the world, here she is in this hospital bed, waiting

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: cancer

Miraculous Recovery

Hunting

Remembering the Beginning

Sick of Being Sick

A Survival Guide to Chemo and Radiation

Cushioning the Fall

falling leaves

Fighting the Odds

Erasure

cancer center sidewalk

Mirror

Matching Rings

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fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: cancer

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