I don't know if it's just the part of me that wants to redeem or re-write the past, but pediatric oncology is still on my list of potential specialties. Maybe once I go out there into the wards as a doctor and not a bystander, it'll be way too much to handle. But maybe the things that break your heart are what God has put on your heart to try and change.
Humans of New York has been doing a series at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, interviewing patients, their parents, nurses, and doctors. Each is very poignant, but I study the doctor ones particularly carefully to see if I could or want to one day be the same. This one especially gets to me, because at some point you ask the question - when is it worth it to stop fighting, and how strong must you be to let things go and just live, even if only for a little while?
“All doctors have those patients who sit on our shoulder. Their image is always with you. One kid will pop into your head every time you hit a wall– when you encounter a disease that is so unrelenting that you’ve exhausted all therapies and you’re still not even close. One memory will keep you going. It’s a different kid for every doctor. It’s hard to know why they stick with us. I remember one patient that had red hair just like my son. And I remember one five-year-old girl who made me laugh, because when I asked her how she was doing, she told me: ‘I don’t know. You’re the doctor.’ And then there was the boy early in my career who was born without an immune system. He’d already lost two older siblings to the same disease. He lived the first two years of his life in an isolation room with no windows, and his entire exposure to the world was through a black-and-white TV. We gave him a bone marrow transplant, and suddenly his immune system came online. And we took him for a walk in the garden. This boy who had spent his entire life in a windowless room. And a sparrow landed on a bush, and he pointed at it, and said: ‘Bird.’ That moment will always be with me.”
