# Was It All Worth It?
Palliative Care Doctor: Palliative care, in medicine, is the specialty of caring for patients who have chronic illnesses such as cancer; the goal is to help patients achieve a good quality of life by controlling…
How We Experience Challenges
For some reason, I never expected to learn something new after having bone marrow cancer for six years – but I did. Most of the “enormous” challenges I experienced did not last anywhere near as…
You May Never Get an Answer to “Why Me?”
It is okay that you do not have an answer. We are searching for answers about our lives, retracing steps and examining choices in hopes of finding the reason, explanation, or thing that makes sense…
Brothers and Sisters in Battle: The Unexpected Gift of Connection
The Man in the Waiting Room
He was sitting there when I walked in, just another person in a hospital gown waiting for his name to be called. We exchanged the casual “hello” that strangers offer each other in shared spaces. But there was something different about this hello. It carried weight. Recognition. An unspoken understanding that we were both members of a club nobody volunteers to join.
When Everything Changes: Finding Strength in the Faces of Strangers Turned Friends
Six years ago, I found myself seated in a wheelchair, weak and afraid, reckoning with words that would eternally mark my life as divided into “before” and “after.” Stage III Bone Marrow Cancer. The diagnosis hung like a weight in the air that I could neither lift nor escape. I was a retired Maxillofacial Trauma Surgeon who had spent more than thirty years caring for thousands of patients, mending broken bones and mangled faces. I thought I understood medicine. I thought I knew what suffering was. But nothing prepares you for that moment when you become the patient. If you are reading this now, having just been diagnosed and searching for something—anything—to make sense of what is happening to you, I want you to know: I understand that terror. I know it well.
