One day in clinic, recently, I reviewed my daily schedule with the oncology fellows who were working with me that day. With the exception of the new patients on my schedule, I recognized all of the names on my list. I opened the electronic chart of the first patient to skim the problem list, a handy spot where I …
Patients become people through the social history
The telephone message arrived in my EMR’s inbox. A patient’s daughter had called and wanted to ask some questions about her mother. Her mother, Louise (name changed), had died about two weeks before.
I hesitated before calling her, recalling her mother’s cancer course.
Louise had been diagnosed with cancer at a relatively young age, in her late 40s. She received curative chemotherapy …
I am so sorry I didn’t make this different for you
“I just want to know that she’ll be able to travel,” my patient’s husband said.
Stan and Jane Jackson (names changed) sat side-by-side on the mauve loveseat in the exam room. A binder filled with sheaths of paper — copies of Jane’s lab reports, CT scan reports, discharge papers, and chemotherapy information handouts — sat open on his lap. On top …
With advanced cancer, there are no guarantees
I received a fax recently, from the office of another hematologist-oncologist, at another academic medical center. Attached to the fax cover page, with my name and fax number scribbled in slanted script, was a five-page consultation report on one of my patients. That oncologist — I’ll call him Dr. Z — had seen and evaluated my patient to provide a second opinion on the patient’s diagnosis and treatment.
The lengthy report …
The art of writing a good consultation letter to another physician
I met with a young patient recently, a woman who has been done with chemotherapy for lymphoma for close to a year. She was feeling well, and she had no symptoms of cancer, nothing that made her suspicious of a recurrence. After I examined her and reviewed her most recent CT scan and labs, I agreed. No recurrence. I wrote in my note, “NED,” the acronym for no evidence of …
No one told me that getting on with life after cancer would be so hard
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