Often, I will sit with a patient or a caregiver, and they will say something to this effect: “Everyone says how good I look or how strong I am. But I don’t feel that way. And it makes me (fill in the difficult emotion here): angry, sad, confused, or alienated. Sometimes, this response is a function of the other person needing to feel safer in the face of something as hard and potentially dangerous as cancer. The person reporting the observed strength, beauty, Continue Reading
Paint by Numbers
I meet with patients all the time, at different points of their diagnosis and treatment. From the minute they are diagnosed, people have to make endless decisions about their cancer treatment. They are becoming experts in everything they never wanted to be experts in and at the speed of light. They are learning about their diagnosis, the disease and its variations as well as treatment options, all while trying to make sense of the changes that will come to their lives as a result. They are using their resources–friends, doctors, nurses, support groups, and the internet–to fill in the blanks and to understand what is happening. Continue Reading
Strong as…Bamboo?
There are a number of objective measures of physical strength. Quite often, when someone is making a comparison or thinking of what it means for an object to be “strong as steel” they are referring to tensile, compression, or yield strength. Though slightly different in their meaning, these are all measures of a point at which a substance is compromised (broken or bent or squashed) by an exertion Continue Reading
The Myth of Protection
There is this thing that happens, that one might have to experience to fully understand. Let me give you a scenario: I walk into the exam room of a patient who is accompanied by their loved person. A son, daughter, sister or husband.
We start a polite conversation, me inquiring regarding their well-being and current needs. Everything is portrayed as being fantastic. Great. “We’re optimistic!”. At some point the loved one’s phone rings and they excuse themselves. Immediately, upon the door closing, leaving us two alone, the Continue Reading
Be the Crab
I absolutely love the show Lost. For those who did not watch it, it told the story of a group of survivors of a plane crash, the fictitious Oceanic flight 815 that left 48 people stranded on an island somewhere in the Pacific. There are a lot of reasons I love the show — for what it asked us to consider, for how we experienced each survivor’s past, present and future, their ability to reconsider who they were, to hope they’d have the opportunity to be something different, given the chance. But one episode in particular always stands out to me. It was early in season one, and is called “The Moth”. Charlie is a young man and a heroin addict. Locke is a middle-aged man who was a paraplegic prior to landing, and whose physical ability was totally restored by the crash…or the island. It’s complicated. At any rate, at Continue Reading