A couple of weeks ago my nurse came to me with a request for a consultation.  Since our schedule has been packed full lately, she’s been asking me where I can squeeze patients in.

She said, “I’m not sure about this one — he says you treated him twenty years ago and he wants to see you.  But there is no new pathology so I don’t know how urgent it is.”

I looked at the consult request and did not remember the patient but there were several handwritten jottings on the cover sheet from the referring physician that listed phone numbers and beside them, “no answer at this number x 3,” and “Dr. Fielding hasn’t worked here since 2004.”  Apparently some effort was made to track me down, since I have changed jobs a few times in the last twenty years. I said, “Well get the latest information on the patient and put him in the open emergency slot a week from Friday.”

So Friday came yesterday and this patient was scheduled at one o’clock.  I like to review the charts before I see new patients, so I picked up the chart during a hurried lunch and read through it with a growing sense of recognition, and no small amount of dread.

The man had been treated for advanced head and neck cancer back in 1994.  He had presented with cancer on the lateral aspect of his tongue, which was excised by his surgeon.  Six months later, he recurred both on the tongue, on the soft palate, and in his neck, with a large tumor wrapped around his jugular vein.  His surgeon tried, even sacrificing the large vein, but he could not resect all of the cancer and the patient was referred to me for post-operative radiation therapy.

Given that the man was only 51-years-old, his medical oncologist made the decision to give him chemotherapy along with the radiation, a decision which was considered quite radical at the time.  Treatments for head and neck cancer back then were crude by today’s standards, and fraught with complications, and this man had had all of them.

By 2000, he could no longer swallow, and his esophagus had to be dilated.  This happened again in 2008, and another procedure provided relief.  His saliva never fully returned after treatment, and so in 2012, plagued with tooth decay, he began a series of extractions, augmented by hyperbaric oxygen therapy to prevent osteoradionecrosis of his mandible.  Unfortunately this did not work, and he ended up having a portion of his jawbone removed.

A year ago, he began to have a new issue — when he tried to swallow the food was going down “the wrong way” and causing him to choke, resulting in several episodes of aspiration pneumonia.  It was becoming hard for him to go out socially, and enjoy a meal with friends and family. His carotid and vertebral arteries were narrowed, putting him at risk for stroke. Multiple recent studies showed no evidence of recurrence of his cancer, but there was scar tissue in the back of the throat which prevented the epiglottis from closing over the trachea when he swallowed.  These were the things I read in his chart before I saw him, and I anticipated that our session together would be an angry one.

Tall, older and thinner than I had last seen him, the patient greeted me with a huge hug.  His wife smiled warmly.  As we sat and talked in our sunny consultation room, he described his current difficulties and told me that his surgeon had referred him back to me for electrical stimulation therapy of the throat muscles, which might help his aspiration.  Our institution has an entire department for the rehabilitation of head and neck cancer patients.  I groped for the right words to say to this man who had suffered through complications which are rare by today’s standards of care.  I apologized profusely, and explained that now we have better ways of shielding normal tissues to spare patients the terrible late effects of treatment.  I told him I would be happy to put in a referral to our swallowing and speech rehabilitation specialists.

He looked at me in surprise, and said, “Doc, I didn’t come here for that.  Dr. M (the surgeon) already put in the referral. When I found out you work here, I came to say thank you.  I was fifty one when I was told that my chances of survival were 10 per cent.  Now I’m seventy one years old.”  He squeezed his wife’s hand and said, “We’ve traveled the world together.  We’ve seen our grandkids graduate high school.  We’re going on a cruise to San Francisco next week.  Yeah, I’ve had my problems but we’re still having fun!”

Some folks are just “the glass is half full” kind of people.  Having always thought of myself as one of them, I’m surprised it took me a whole consultation to recognize that in my patient. Taking care of cancer patients has always been a good way to remind myself that my own life is not so bad.  Lesson learned, again.

Miranda Fielding is a radiation oncologist who blogs at The Crab Diaries.