As predicted! It was a long, boring day in the hospital, made much nicer by legions of friends cutting class, on lunch break, or taking time away from their real jobs to stop by and keep me company. The IV Benadryl helped, too. My mother and father spent the day in the hospital with me, and mom stayed for the rest of the week, filling my fridge with food and making everything easy.
The next day was Match Day, which is when all of the current 4th year medical students at medical schools across the country open envelopes all at the same time to find out what kind of doctor they are going to be, and where they are spending the next three to seven years of their lives. It is a sadistic institution, one among many involved in the making of an American doctor. It was an extremely emotional day for all of my fourth-year friends, and while alien diaphragmatic contractions kept me at home and away from the Agony and the Ecstasy, it was emotional for me, too. I began medical school with all of these people who will officially be "doctors" in a month and a half. Together we took our first deep breaths of formaldehyde-laden air before cutting into our cadavers. I watched all of these people flail with stethoscopes and tuning forks. For four years we've bitched and moaned together about everything that was wrong with the curriculum, our fellow students, the hospital, and the American health care system in general. And in the meantime, somehow, all these people became shockingly competent. (Well, most of them.) And I know that I've learned a lot too, yadda yadda yadda. But it's sad to be losing friends as they scatter across the country, and frustrating to feel left behind.
By the weekend, I really was feeling pretty decent, and by the beginning of the next week, it was clear that I was feeling altogether too good to not get back to work. I have had to miss two exams while flying around the country consulting with various doctors and deciding what to do, and they have to be made up at some point. Even without however many more rounds of chemotherapy and an enormous surgery, I still have the most academically intense few months of my life ahead of me as I prepare to take the national board exams in time to begin third year rotations. I am just going to have to make hay while the sun shines, and hope that the storm clouds pass quickly.
With a refrigerator stocked full of mom-cooked meals, a perfect breeze coming through my plant-filled atrium, and new tomato seedlings to check on during study breaks, in one week I slid five weeks of GI/Liver in peristalitic waves down my esophagus, across the glistening rugal folds of my gastric mucosa, past the squirting sphincter of Oddi, along my non-atretic small intestine, past the place my appendix used to be, through the shuttling haustra of my colon, and out onto a Scantron. It was a mess, but it got flushed.
Next?!
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
And... go.
The first time around, I had these gangly tubes sticking out of the inside of my left arm that waggled all over the place and made dressing and undressing an acrobatic activity. The next time, they moved the venous access more centrally, and I sprouted tubes out of my chest. While I could finally take a shower without wrapping my arm in an elephant condom, it was still stressful to try to keep it clean and dry. This time, I have finally achieved a true man-machine hybrid state: this morning, a port was installed. A chamber 2cm in diameter bulges out from under the skin on my chest, and is connected to my heart via a tube that loops over my clavicle and down through my jugular vein. When they want to inject anything or draw a blood sample, a needle pierces a thin layer of skin and enters into the chamber. Way less stress and maintenance. And completely badass.
I sit writing this the night before I start my third chemotherapy regimen. I am feeling strangely... good. All of the stress associated with figuring out what to do is in the past. Now all there is to do is live. Tomorrow I will go to the hospital. It will mostly be boring. Some of it will probably be uncomfortable. Then the infusion will be over, and I will go home. I'll probably feel bad for a while. I'll probably sleep some. After a while, I'll feel better, and we'll go from there. It's very simple, really.
I sit writing this the night before I start my third chemotherapy regimen. I am feeling strangely... good. All of the stress associated with figuring out what to do is in the past. Now all there is to do is live. Tomorrow I will go to the hospital. It will mostly be boring. Some of it will probably be uncomfortable. Then the infusion will be over, and I will go home. I'll probably feel bad for a while. I'll probably sleep some. After a while, I'll feel better, and we'll go from there. It's very simple, really.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
It's time
The past few weeks have been very difficult. I have never been good at pulling the trigger on making big decisions, and the decision of which course of treatment to pursue was as big as they come, because of the immensity of the consequences either way. There have been so many twists and turns lately that I have not had a settled moment until now to write. This entry is going to be long, I am warning you. You should probably go get yourself a cup of tea if you actually plan on reading it all. If you just want the bottom line, feel free to skip to the last paragraph.
After meeting with three different doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, my family and I flew to Indianapolis to consult with the doctors there, and then I went back to Palo Alto for a week to regroup. It kind of felt like my own personal Camp David. Away of the mundanities and distractions of daily life in Los Angeles, looking at a crackling fire and a dozing old hound dog instead of a hospital waiting room, I had the space to think. The thing that continues to make this whole situation so complicated is that due to what was likely a medical error early in my care, my case is literally unique, and so none of the data that is out there in the scientific literature is directly applicable. Reading the literature, talking things out with friends and family, and communicating with doctors in LA, Indiana, and New York, I did my best to get a handle on all of the whys, buts, ands, and what ifs of this very complicated case. I have had the immense good fortune to have doctors who have displayed not only amazing intelligence, but inspiring humanity. Though there have been moments of ego-driven hyperbole, there have been even more moments of humility and dedication. I think that I can speak for all of my family and friends who were involved in this effort that it has been a challenge to keep it together as we bounced, often out of sync with each other, between dispassionate analysis, fearful anger, lazy resignation, and blind, screaming frustration. I will curse this cancer for the rest of my days for having caused so much disruption in so many peoples' lives, but it is not so simple as that. I also I have it to thank for opening my eyes to the spectacular love and dedication that surrounds me.
I have been forced to think about parts of medicine that no patient should have to consider, but I have to admit are germaine to becoming a doctor (ahem... I hope that the instructors of my Professionalism and the Practice of Medicine course will be moved to excuse a number of absences):
I have learned that despite the advent of instant communication and information access, medicine sometimes seems in fact to be operating under the guild system, where an apprentice learns a craft from a master, and continues as part of a proud but covert lineage. It became clear that as my doctors extrapolated as best they could from the data points that each of them found most relevant, they based their interpretations on their own personal anecdotal experiences, which were largely dependent on where and with whom they had trained.
I witnessed five master clinicians, each the chair of {his} respective department at world-famous institutions, navigate the treacherous waters of communicating with a patient. They had to make sure that I and my family felt respected and autonomous while they pitched their strategy, not so adamantly that they came across as cocky, but not so weakly that I did not take them seriously; they had to be able to use data when I required it, without rigidly sticking to statistics; they had to find ways of expressing respectful disagreement with their colleagues while advocating their own approach; they struggled to find analogies that resonated with me, and then suffered the consequences when I used those same analogies to argue against them.
I grappled with some scary questions about the way medical decisions are made. To what extent were my doctors' opinions, consciously or subconsciously, formed by their own career goals, the financial health of their hospitals, the success of their clinical trials? To put it simply, who could I trust?
Out of that Camp David week in Palo Alto, a hybrid plan was wrangled that combined the Indiana and Sloan Kettering approaches. Nobody got what exactly what they wanted, except me. I got to take the more convincing Indiana logic and combine it with the more relevant surgical expertise in New York. I got to avoid the toxicity of chemotherapy, while having the peace of mind of a surgery that could end this saga once and for all. [Those of you who know the whole story know that I am making this WAY more rosy than it actually was, but you know what? It's my history, and I am having fun rewriting it.] I would definitely be able to stay in school, and I would get to spend a whole month catching up with all of my New York friends. It was a great plan. Too bad it didn't last. [Is living in Hollywood getting the better of me? I am really trying not to over-dramatize this, but seriously, it's hard.]
When I got a new measurement of my tumor markers, all this got thrown out the window. The numbers have increased only slightly, but enough so that the Sloan-Kettering team no longer feels that it is appropriate to do surgery. It's been two and a half months of dithering. Time is running short, as are emotional fuses on all sides. It is time to act.
Another flurry of emails, hours and hours of phone calls and office visits, and multiple anxiety-ridden freak-outs later, I have made my decision. While there isn't a best decision, this one is mine, and I am as at peace with it as I can be. My port will be placed this Tuesday morning, and chemo will begin on Wednesday at USC/Norris. I will be getting gemcytabine/oxaliplatin/taxol every two weeks for as many cycles as it takes to render me marker negative, plus two more cycles. I will be in the day hospital for one long day each two weeks, and then probably be some kind of miserable for a few days after, the miserable period probably getting longer with each cycle. My white blood cell counts will certainly drop, so I am going to need visitors to be healthy and to be sure to wash their hands. The chemotherapy will be followed by an extensive surgery at Sloan-Kettering to remove as much of the residual tumor mass as possible. I still don't know how this will impact my progression through medical school. I am scared about lasting toxicity from the chemotherapy, and I am worried about surgical complications. But I am ready to be as sure as I can be that I am done with this once and for all. This anvil hanging over my head (or rather, in my guts) just distorts my life too much.
It is time to stop questioning, and instead to focus our collective energies on ensuring the best possible outcome. As I enter this next phase, I humbly ask once again for your love and support.
After meeting with three different doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, my family and I flew to Indianapolis to consult with the doctors there, and then I went back to Palo Alto for a week to regroup. It kind of felt like my own personal Camp David. Away of the mundanities and distractions of daily life in Los Angeles, looking at a crackling fire and a dozing old hound dog instead of a hospital waiting room, I had the space to think. The thing that continues to make this whole situation so complicated is that due to what was likely a medical error early in my care, my case is literally unique, and so none of the data that is out there in the scientific literature is directly applicable. Reading the literature, talking things out with friends and family, and communicating with doctors in LA, Indiana, and New York, I did my best to get a handle on all of the whys, buts, ands, and what ifs of this very complicated case. I have had the immense good fortune to have doctors who have displayed not only amazing intelligence, but inspiring humanity. Though there have been moments of ego-driven hyperbole, there have been even more moments of humility and dedication. I think that I can speak for all of my family and friends who were involved in this effort that it has been a challenge to keep it together as we bounced, often out of sync with each other, between dispassionate analysis, fearful anger, lazy resignation, and blind, screaming frustration. I will curse this cancer for the rest of my days for having caused so much disruption in so many peoples' lives, but it is not so simple as that. I also I have it to thank for opening my eyes to the spectacular love and dedication that surrounds me.
I have been forced to think about parts of medicine that no patient should have to consider, but I have to admit are germaine to becoming a doctor (ahem... I hope that the instructors of my Professionalism and the Practice of Medicine course will be moved to excuse a number of absences):
I have learned that despite the advent of instant communication and information access, medicine sometimes seems in fact to be operating under the guild system, where an apprentice learns a craft from a master, and continues as part of a proud but covert lineage. It became clear that as my doctors extrapolated as best they could from the data points that each of them found most relevant, they based their interpretations on their own personal anecdotal experiences, which were largely dependent on where and with whom they had trained.
I witnessed five master clinicians, each the chair of {his} respective department at world-famous institutions, navigate the treacherous waters of communicating with a patient. They had to make sure that I and my family felt respected and autonomous while they pitched their strategy, not so adamantly that they came across as cocky, but not so weakly that I did not take them seriously; they had to be able to use data when I required it, without rigidly sticking to statistics; they had to find ways of expressing respectful disagreement with their colleagues while advocating their own approach; they struggled to find analogies that resonated with me, and then suffered the consequences when I used those same analogies to argue against them.
I grappled with some scary questions about the way medical decisions are made. To what extent were my doctors' opinions, consciously or subconsciously, formed by their own career goals, the financial health of their hospitals, the success of their clinical trials? To put it simply, who could I trust?
Out of that Camp David week in Palo Alto, a hybrid plan was wrangled that combined the Indiana and Sloan Kettering approaches. Nobody got what exactly what they wanted, except me. I got to take the more convincing Indiana logic and combine it with the more relevant surgical expertise in New York. I got to avoid the toxicity of chemotherapy, while having the peace of mind of a surgery that could end this saga once and for all. [Those of you who know the whole story know that I am making this WAY more rosy than it actually was, but you know what? It's my history, and I am having fun rewriting it.] I would definitely be able to stay in school, and I would get to spend a whole month catching up with all of my New York friends. It was a great plan. Too bad it didn't last. [Is living in Hollywood getting the better of me? I am really trying not to over-dramatize this, but seriously, it's hard.]
When I got a new measurement of my tumor markers, all this got thrown out the window. The numbers have increased only slightly, but enough so that the Sloan-Kettering team no longer feels that it is appropriate to do surgery. It's been two and a half months of dithering. Time is running short, as are emotional fuses on all sides. It is time to act.
Another flurry of emails, hours and hours of phone calls and office visits, and multiple anxiety-ridden freak-outs later, I have made my decision. While there isn't a best decision, this one is mine, and I am as at peace with it as I can be. My port will be placed this Tuesday morning, and chemo will begin on Wednesday at USC/Norris. I will be getting gemcytabine/oxaliplatin/taxol every two weeks for as many cycles as it takes to render me marker negative, plus two more cycles. I will be in the day hospital for one long day each two weeks, and then probably be some kind of miserable for a few days after, the miserable period probably getting longer with each cycle. My white blood cell counts will certainly drop, so I am going to need visitors to be healthy and to be sure to wash their hands. The chemotherapy will be followed by an extensive surgery at Sloan-Kettering to remove as much of the residual tumor mass as possible. I still don't know how this will impact my progression through medical school. I am scared about lasting toxicity from the chemotherapy, and I am worried about surgical complications. But I am ready to be as sure as I can be that I am done with this once and for all. This anvil hanging over my head (or rather, in my guts) just distorts my life too much.
It is time to stop questioning, and instead to focus our collective energies on ensuring the best possible outcome. As I enter this next phase, I humbly ask once again for your love and support.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
New York, again
I write from a bedroom in New York City, listening to the roar of the city through the open window – the only apparent way of counteracting the overactive heater. A little global warming with your tea?
I have been in a strange limbo-land for the past few weeks, and I want to apologize to the many friends I have failed to call or write back. I don’t want to be in the position of having to guard my own time and sanity by separating myself from people, nor do I want to spend my life, whether it be short or long, in such a self-centered place.
I find myself in weary acceptance; other times, I’m so SICK of this $%^&! Sometimes I am overwhelmed with sadness. Often, I am spectacularly successful at not thinking about any of this at all. But I have been trying, in many ways, to focus my energy toward the pursuit of a long and happy life. Going to class as much as I could felt like a good way to keep moving forward and remain engaged with the world (though I did catch a disgusting flu from interviewing a patient in the hospital). Skiing at Mammoth, and Salsa and Bollywood dance classes were steps toward getting in better shape. Eating better and drinking less are part of keeping up my end of the bargain.
At some point during these past few weeks I came to a realization that I had made a long time back, but had forgotten when fear set in again: that at every stage, there are too many possible undesirable outcomes to plan for, and that the only way out of this stagnant swamp of sadness is to plan on the best case scenario. This doesn’t mean blind optimism. It means removing obstacles that stand in the way of the best outcome, and being prepared to redefine “best outcome” as time goes on.
Four consecutive blood draws have shown that my tumor markers remain stable, but detectable. The testosterone challenge test that I mentioned last time didn’t produce any fluctuation in my tumor markers, indicating that I am indeed facing a recurrence and not some freak endocrine problem. While PET-CT is not likely to be very sensitive nor specific in this kind of cancer, I had one anyway just in case. It did not show any widespread disease, which is reassuring despite the caveats.
Today I had my first appointment with Dr Bosl at Memorial Sloan-Kettering since I saw him under eerily similar circumstances in April 2007. It was unfortunately more confusing than clarifying, since his team does not interpret the recent CT scans the same way as Einhorn in Indiana or Quinn at USC. In short, they don’t see anything that they can point to and feel confident calling active disease. As a consequence, Bosl is recommending chemotherapy to treat disseminated (but not visible) disease, followed by an extensive surgery to remove any resistant cells plus any teratoma that is there. Einhorn in Indiana has a very different opinion, recommending a relatively limited (though still major) surgery to remove the growing nodule that he says he can see and believes to be the unique source of the increased tumor markers. These are radically different approaches, and imply radically different risks. I am still unsure what to do, and need to explore all of the ifs, ands, and buts of each approach, which will take some more time.
My family and I will be staying in New York over the long weekend, catching up with family and friends, and wholeheartedly enjoying our forced vacation. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I have appointments with the surgeons who will be on my case if I choose to continue here at Sloan-Kettering, and we hope to continue on to Indiana to meet with the surgical team there later in the week. Hopefully, a plan will have emerged by this time next week. The best plan. For now.
I have been in a strange limbo-land for the past few weeks, and I want to apologize to the many friends I have failed to call or write back. I don’t want to be in the position of having to guard my own time and sanity by separating myself from people, nor do I want to spend my life, whether it be short or long, in such a self-centered place.
I find myself in weary acceptance; other times, I’m so SICK of this $%^&! Sometimes I am overwhelmed with sadness. Often, I am spectacularly successful at not thinking about any of this at all. But I have been trying, in many ways, to focus my energy toward the pursuit of a long and happy life. Going to class as much as I could felt like a good way to keep moving forward and remain engaged with the world (though I did catch a disgusting flu from interviewing a patient in the hospital). Skiing at Mammoth, and Salsa and Bollywood dance classes were steps toward getting in better shape. Eating better and drinking less are part of keeping up my end of the bargain.
At some point during these past few weeks I came to a realization that I had made a long time back, but had forgotten when fear set in again: that at every stage, there are too many possible undesirable outcomes to plan for, and that the only way out of this stagnant swamp of sadness is to plan on the best case scenario. This doesn’t mean blind optimism. It means removing obstacles that stand in the way of the best outcome, and being prepared to redefine “best outcome” as time goes on.
Four consecutive blood draws have shown that my tumor markers remain stable, but detectable. The testosterone challenge test that I mentioned last time didn’t produce any fluctuation in my tumor markers, indicating that I am indeed facing a recurrence and not some freak endocrine problem. While PET-CT is not likely to be very sensitive nor specific in this kind of cancer, I had one anyway just in case. It did not show any widespread disease, which is reassuring despite the caveats.
Today I had my first appointment with Dr Bosl at Memorial Sloan-Kettering since I saw him under eerily similar circumstances in April 2007. It was unfortunately more confusing than clarifying, since his team does not interpret the recent CT scans the same way as Einhorn in Indiana or Quinn at USC. In short, they don’t see anything that they can point to and feel confident calling active disease. As a consequence, Bosl is recommending chemotherapy to treat disseminated (but not visible) disease, followed by an extensive surgery to remove any resistant cells plus any teratoma that is there. Einhorn in Indiana has a very different opinion, recommending a relatively limited (though still major) surgery to remove the growing nodule that he says he can see and believes to be the unique source of the increased tumor markers. These are radically different approaches, and imply radically different risks. I am still unsure what to do, and need to explore all of the ifs, ands, and buts of each approach, which will take some more time.
My family and I will be staying in New York over the long weekend, catching up with family and friends, and wholeheartedly enjoying our forced vacation. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I have appointments with the surgeons who will be on my case if I choose to continue here at Sloan-Kettering, and we hope to continue on to Indiana to meet with the surgical team there later in the week. Hopefully, a plan will have emerged by this time next week. The best plan. For now.
Friday, January 23, 2009
A new chapter
I’m not really sure how to begin this entry, because I myself am feeling very detached from what is going on. I have reached the point at which it is too heartbreaking to repeat my bad news over and over again to all the people that I love, as I struggle to deal with it myself.
When the unmistakable Australian accent of my doctor emerged last Tuesday night from behind the blocked number on my cell phone, the rest of the world fell silent.
Two surgeries, eight rounds of “conventional” chemotherapy, and two courses of high-dose chemotherapy with stem cell transplant have failed to eradicate the cancer from my body. There is a small new lesion that has formed within the old scar tissue between my liver and my right kidney, and a very low, but significant new elevation in bHCG, a tumor marker found in my blood. There have been three successive blood tests that have confirmed this. They have also confirmed something positive: that the tumor marker is for the moment stable, and so does not likely indicate a rapidly-growing, imminently dangerous tumor. Despite this, the best oncological minds at USC/Norris, Indiana, and Sloan Kettering agree that this is indeed an ominous development and must be dealt with promptly.
I am in a very scary spot. There are so few people who have gone through this that decisions on what to do next are no longer being based on data, but on anecdotal experience and (semi-) educated guesswork. When I first found a lump (when was that? Even I’ve lost count…: April 2006), the chance for complete cure was something like 98%. That percentage fell to something like 80% at the next phase, then to something like 50% (depending on who you asked) before I relapsed and had to move on to the high dose chemo with stem cell transplant regimen. The chance for a cure is now probably much lower than that, though it seems that the paucity of data makes any number practically meaningless.
There are many possible next steps, but none will ever be satisfactorily confidence-inspiring. We are at a point where circle on the Venn diagram that contains the “curative” approaches has a lot of overlap with the circle that contains “palliative” measures; that is to say, it is unclear what, if anything, will rid me of this once and for all. There is little assurance that a plan designed to be curative would be any more effective than an approach intended to delay the inevitable. The clinical decision-making process in which my doctors and I have been engaged is too complex and convoluted to be fully described here, but that fact alone is really the point: there is no right answer.
That said, there is general agreement among my three teams of what their experience suggests provides the best hope for a cure: return my tumor markers back to normal by administering a new round of chemotherapy treatments containing compounds I have not been exposed to yet (taxol, gemcytabine, and maybe oxaliplatin), followed by a quite complicated surgery to remove both the new mass and as much of the accumulated gunk in my peritoneum as possible. Because of its truly unique distribution, this will likely require a team of surgeons from a number of different sub-specialties.
We are conducting a test at the moment that may or may not change my eventual treatment, but which hopefully at the very least will be amusing in the short run. It turns out that an elevation in LH, the hormone that in males drives the production of testosterone, can be misinterpreted by the machine as an elevation in the tumor marker bHCG. Not that there is any reason to suspect that I may have some separate endocrinological issue going on that would be making my LH go up, but in the name of dotting all the “i”s and crossing all the “t”s, I was given an injection of testosterone this afternoon. The idea is that while the tumor marker would be unaffected if it is indeed a tumor marker, if it decreases within a week of the injection, then in fact it was not a tumor marker at all but an elevation in LH, which would be suppressed by feedback inhibition exerted by testosterone. So far I haven’t felt any weirder than I already do considering the circumstances, but I am a bit worried to let myself out in public. At any moment I might go on a raping and pillaging binge, so watch out!
My life is completely up in the air. I don’t know where I will be getting treatment, nor how incapacitated it will make me, or for how long it will last. I don’t yet know what this means in terms of continuing with school. I don’t know if the stress school causes is a contributor to my illness, or if it is a motivating force that gives the direction and purpose I need to persevere. I don’t know if the independence I value so highly after two years without it is something to cling to, or whether it is more reasonable to retreat back into the protective comfort of home. I don’t even know what I am doing tomorrow morning. I don’t know. I just don’t know.
There was only one logical response to the shattering of my peace of mind: I threw a huge impromptu party last Wednesday night, and then flew to Washington DC for four days of celebration with family, friends, and two million other jubilant people.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Pictures
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Birthday post 2008
I looked out the window of my lab, down at the quad of the medical school. A line of second-year medical students was forming in front of a booth that had been set up to administer TB tests. Supposedly, I was a part of that group milling around down there, forming a nebulous line while exchanging beginning-of-the-school-year high-fives and hugs after having spent the summer apart, except that I didn’t know anybody to be high-fiving or hugging, and I have spent almost two years away from school.
As the summer has begun to wane and I look forward to finally re-joining second year of medical school, I have become increasingly worried about being able to keep up. It was daunting enough, before being addled by a flurry of pills and a slurry of secretions. Is it still reasonable to expect to achieve the goals I set Before? What future do I have to look forward to? Untrustworthy doctor? Med school dropout? Disgruntled lab tech? Disability recipient? Family mooch? There have been some pretty scary times over here.
I went downstairs and out into the sun. For a few minutes, I just stood there, sweating, alone in a crowd of people who all knew each other. And then one recognized me. And then I was introduced to someone else. We chatted. It wasn’t so bad. Say what you will about medical students (and I have), but I defy you to find another group of 170 people who are as social, energetic, and can-do as these people. I guess I can deal with that. I got up to the front of the line, and when the nurse asked my name, I started to explain that I wouldn’t be surprised if I wasn’t on the list because you know it’s complicated I’ve been … Oh. I AM on the list? Wow. OK. Great.
After lunch, the herd moved upstairs to the building where our cubicles are. Not that I expected to have one… oh wait. Look! It’s my name! On a cubicle! (this very well may be the first time in recorded history that anyone has reacted positively to this sight). And they had a new badge for me. There I am, peering out from a plastic card! I must actually exist!
A couple of days later, I am walking through the lobby of Norris, the cancer hospital where I was treated, and I see Evelyn, one of my favorite nurses. We exchange hugs, and hold back tears. She asks if I have time to come upstairs and meet a new patient of hers who just started his first round of chemo. Of COURSE I do. He’s in 3314. I know which way to turn out of the elevator. I know where to find the hand sanitizer. And when I see this young man sitting on the bed, hooked up to an IV, looking shaken but courageous, and when I see his mother sitting beside him, looking calm and determined, I know them too.
I can do this.
As the summer has begun to wane and I look forward to finally re-joining second year of medical school, I have become increasingly worried about being able to keep up. It was daunting enough, before being addled by a flurry of pills and a slurry of secretions. Is it still reasonable to expect to achieve the goals I set Before? What future do I have to look forward to? Untrustworthy doctor? Med school dropout? Disgruntled lab tech? Disability recipient? Family mooch? There have been some pretty scary times over here.
I went downstairs and out into the sun. For a few minutes, I just stood there, sweating, alone in a crowd of people who all knew each other. And then one recognized me. And then I was introduced to someone else. We chatted. It wasn’t so bad. Say what you will about medical students (and I have), but I defy you to find another group of 170 people who are as social, energetic, and can-do as these people. I guess I can deal with that. I got up to the front of the line, and when the nurse asked my name, I started to explain that I wouldn’t be surprised if I wasn’t on the list because you know it’s complicated I’ve been … Oh. I AM on the list? Wow. OK. Great.
After lunch, the herd moved upstairs to the building where our cubicles are. Not that I expected to have one… oh wait. Look! It’s my name! On a cubicle! (this very well may be the first time in recorded history that anyone has reacted positively to this sight). And they had a new badge for me. There I am, peering out from a plastic card! I must actually exist!
A couple of days later, I am walking through the lobby of Norris, the cancer hospital where I was treated, and I see Evelyn, one of my favorite nurses. We exchange hugs, and hold back tears. She asks if I have time to come upstairs and meet a new patient of hers who just started his first round of chemo. Of COURSE I do. He’s in 3314. I know which way to turn out of the elevator. I know where to find the hand sanitizer. And when I see this young man sitting on the bed, hooked up to an IV, looking shaken but courageous, and when I see his mother sitting beside him, looking calm and determined, I know them too.
I can do this.
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