Parenting After Cancer: Hope Lives On

One of the organizations I am truly honored to be a part of is the Young Survival Coalition—an organization meant to provide community for women diagnosed with breast cancer before the age of 40. Each year they gather for the YSC Summit, and this year, I spoke to this incredible group as part of a panel alongside Susan Love and Angel Rodriguez. My talk was on approaching life after breast cancer, and it was meant to be an overview of critical issues and needs in this group, as well as a guide to resources—a lot to do in 20 minutes for sure.

Is It a Recommendation or a Suggestion?

One of the most valuable jobs I held following fellowship was working as a full-time Deputy Editor at UpToDate. My “territory” was breast, gynecologic, and genitourinary oncology, and I helped launch cancer survivorship and palliative care. I also learned to really and critically read the literature, and how to summarize it quickly so that my audience—whether it be colleagues or my own patients—could understand what we learned, and the limitations of those results.

It Was Supposed to Work

Immunotherapy. It seems everyone has heard about it, or at least seen the commercials on television. I was part of the team at ASCO that declared it to be the cancer advancement of the year in 2016. I still think it’s been an incredible discovery, and when James Allison and Tasuku Honjo were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2018 for their discoveries, the honor was truly deserved.

Teachable Moment or One to Be Ignored…

I love medicine. The chance to interact with people at their most vulnerable, to learn about them and their loved ones, to help them through a diagnosis of cancer, to provide hope in the present and a way to envision the future—it truly is a remarkable thing. Most days I still consider how lucky I am to be doing such important work. I’ve learned I am human, and that it’s not antithetical to the practice of medicine. I try to be conscious of my own emotions and of my own biases, so that at the end of the day, I can feel good about the care I’ve rendered—to know that I’ve treated patients as equally as possible, and that I’ve not determined a course of treatment based on my own impression of “what’s best for them”. Still, in medicine, as in life, patients are also people, and people aren’t perfect. They have their own thoughts and wishes, they have read the literature to reach their own conclusions, and they have their own prejudices, too. In those times, I will admit that even after more than two decades as a doctor, I still struggle to respond.