Every day, I am invited into the most intimate and vulnerable chapters of another person’s life. Chapters no one ever plans for, marked by fear, grief, courage, and extraordinary love.
I have sat across from a 64-year-old man newly diagnosed with prostate cancer and watched tears fall from his eyes for the first time in over a decade. I have seen trembling hands of a young woman reach instinctively for her mother after hearing that a scan revealed brain metastases from lung cancer. I have watched an elderly woman in her 90s cling desperately to her husband’s arm, feeling the unfathomable weight of losing her best friend. Behind the language of staging, prognosis, and treatment options are human beings confronting their own mortality for the very first time.
Most recently, I witnessed a young man collapse to the floor of an inpatient ward as his partner died suddenly before him, grief erupting in raw, unbearable shock. A young woman with a radiant smile, a sense of adventure, dreams for the future, and an entire lifetime ahead of her, gone within minutes.
No medical school textbook teaches you how heavy silence feels in those moments. No training truly prepares you to witness heartbreak so profound it seems to stop time itself. I will never fully comprehend the depth of pain families endure in those unimaginable losses.
Oncology can be absolutely heartbreaking.
After certain dark moments, I wonder to myself: How do oncologists process this grief? The truth is, I don’t know that we ever really can. Some losses follow us home. They sit quietly beside us on the commute back after a call shift. They return unexpectedly in the silence before sleep. I find myself hugging my parents and my husband tighter. I cry into the arms of my co-residents. The sharpness of the pain softens with time, but certain faces remain with us forever. Certain conversations replay in our minds years later. Certain patients unknowingly carve permanent spaces into our hearts.
Perhaps grief is not something to “get over.” Perhaps grief is simply the price of caring deeply.
Over time, I have realized that the only way to survive the heartbreak of oncology is to let love remain larger than the loss. To remember that even when we cannot cure disease or save a life, we can still offer comfort. We can still listen. We can still hold space for fear, for hope, for dignity, for humanity.
To walk alongside patients and families through these moments is the highest honor. They allow us into the most sacred chapters of their lives. They trust us when they are frightened. They show resilience when they have every reason to fall apart.
Oncology has reminded me that time is precious beyond measure, that vulnerability is not weakness, and that love persists even in the face of devastating uncertainty. I leave work each day carrying pieces of these stories with me. They have changed the way I practice medicine, the way I understand humanity, and the way I live my own life.
I am endlessly grateful.
Rachel Jin is a radiation oncologist.
