Kevin - Week 4

This week was the usual routine. Spend a little time here working on my research project. Get closer and closer to feeling like I'm a bit "up to speed." Then spend a little time there seeing patients. This week it felt like I saw a lot more patients who were doing extremely well, and it was a very nice change of pace. I've definitely started to get a sense of the general prognoses for the different cancers, and it's not just a statistic in a book anymore. There were a few patients that came in simply for checkups; their treatments had been successful and their cancer had been in remission for years. One woman had been fine for 10+ years, and another over 20. Those visits seemed more like old friends catching up over lunch than any official business. But I guess that must be natural; these two people have in a way shared that experience for a long time. I'm sure that after decades of random chitchat you would know a person well. Other visits may not have been as positive, but it was still interesting seeing the different outlooks that people took towards their situation. One woman had been diagnosed with breast cancer that spread to her ovaries, and she didn't discover this until she was hospitalized for a pulmonary embolism. It was a life-threatening situation, but she made it through and they put her on blood thinners and figured out the problem. The crazy thing was, after she discovered she had cancer she opted out of chemo or any other treatment. I met her a year after that decision, and she looked perfectly fine to me. It was amazing. She just seemed so...comfortable with her life, and she was ok with being done with it whenever. I've never seen anyone like that before, and oddly enough she was in better health than a good portion of the people I have seen. It must be willpower. I wonder how she gets around all day lugging balls of steel like that.