Dear Cancer Patient

It's 235am, I'm up reading a unit on cancer, diagnosis, and therapy. I thought about a patient I helped take care of several months ago. I still think of this patient from time to time, and feel pretty sad.

I remember seeing another one of my patients vomiting blood during visits, the entire family gathered around them every time I entered the room. I wanted my visit to be longer, to talk more with the patient and their family, but I'm low on the hierarchy and as a medical student, you run by everyone else's schedule. It destroys me to see the strongest, bravest people die from cancer.

These patients struggle every day, with white counts of 0.2, spontaneous terrifying infections, pain, nausea, vomiting, thinking every single day about their clash with mortality. It sends shock waves through families and twists and stresses the ties between them.

 Chemotherapy isn't as far along as I thought it was. I wish we were gaining ground on cancer at a faster pace. There's just no one "cancer," there's different types of breast cancers with different prognoses, the same with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. It seems like everyone you meet has the type with the worst prognosis.

 And then when you meet the patient who is "easily curable" with chemotherapy, their hospitalization is rather boring, then punctuated with infections that appear from nowhere.

I hope my cancer patient is happy and strong, and found peace with their disease and the world. I hope they are living the rest of their days in the warmth and happiness of others.

Which reminds me, whenever I felt so sick and sad from seeing so many patients on their way to home hospice, on my disposition plans, I always wrote:


"Patient to be discharged home to spend the rest of their time surrounded by their friends and loved ones." 

 Medicine is full of heartbreak. We struggle all the time.