misery

she:
wasted.
starving.
cancer is leaching her body of everything it needs to look and feel well.
the eye sockets tell it all.
hollow.

he:
hands - wringing
knuckles - white
legs - wound tightly. like DNA
foot - swinging urgently
eyes - tearing
brow - furrowed
worried - sick

one cancer. two patients.
heartache all around.

she: 'can i smoke pot...for the nausea...for the misery?'
me: of course

i hope they both smoke it.
maybe i should have given them a prescription for Doritos.

thanks

i love that feeling - being the bearer of good news. telling the alpha male body builder with leukemia that we can barely detect his disease - that his numbers are the lowest they've been in 4 years - that what we did appears to be working. it's worth a thousand bad days at work to see him well up, rise out of his chair and give me a big alpha male body builder hug. my feet left the ground. he hugged me so tightly that even through a pectoralis the size of my head, i could still hear his heart racing, pounding with incredulous joy. 'thank you. thank you', he kept repeating while balancing eyelids full of tears, willing them not to actually fall. he gave the doctor one of those testosterone-mediated aggressive handshake/back slap combos, but i know he really wanted to kiss him. silly men.

when things go badly, i always hear myself saying, 'i'm sorry', and patients race to say, 'it's not your fault', which of course i know. but when things go well, the same patients say thank you in such a way and with such an intensity - as if i had gone in there myself and tidied up their bone marrow with my own hands. they hold us responsible for the victories in a way that they don't hold us responsible for the failures. at least that's what it feels like. and even though i know i'm not responsible, i say, 'you're welcome'. the intense gratitude makes me feel like a superhero for a minute. that is until i go to leave and through a brief series of ungraceful events, catch my stethoscope on the door handle and almost hang myself, pretty much negating the whole superhero thing.

i love this feeling. i need to bottle it. and get a spritzer for the bottle. and apply liberally.

onkos

from the greek roots index:
ONCOLOGY, from Greek... to carry... with derived noun onkos, a burden, mass, hence a tumor.

a burden indeed.
the burden of disfigurement
the burden of worry
the burden of pain
the burden of hours spent waiting for appointments and results
the burden of needle sticks and missed needle sticks and biopsies and surgeries
the burden of being told you're one of the lucky ones and wondering when you're going to start feeling lucky

quote

patient quote of the day:

we are going over the consent for a clinical trial and i am reviewing possible side effects. he interrupts and says, " you know i've had every weird symptom imaginable over the last 3 years. just hit the highlights - just tell me how high it's likely to register on my Weird-Shit-O-Meter."

that makes me want to design a clinical trial to study the WSOM and see if we couldn't standardize it for all to use.