The Two Sides

Cancer has become a familiar topic in my life these days because many friends have lost relatives to it.

My boss happened to recommend an article by Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of John F. Kennedy, in The New Yorker. In that piece, she describes discovering she had cancer shortly after giving birth to her second child. Nurses noticed unusually high white blood cell counts. She brushed it off at first because she felt strong and lived a healthy life. She exercised often. Nothing seemed wrong. Yet the tests showed acute myeloid leukemia, tied to a rare mutation called Inversion 3.

She wrote about the treatments she underwent, including a bone marrow transplant, and how the disease kept returning. She wrote about missing time with her children, especially her newborn. She lost nearly half of her baby’s first year. 

After reading her story, I listened to a conversation with Atul Gawande, a surgeon who also writes. In his early career, he struggled with the discomfort of being imperfect, especially during his first operations. Later, he learned to accept mistakes and trust his ability to respond to them. But when he entered cancer care, he faced a different kind of difficulty. He said that in cancer practice, you often meet patients you simply cannot fix. He admitted he did not yet know what it meant to be good at caring for people whose problems had no cure.

I cried when I read Schlossberg’s story. As a mother, I worry about the possibility of serious illness, whether in myself or in my daughter, and the thought of being apart by death is frightening. Like Schlossberg, I want to enjoy every single moment with my child, because none of us knows how long we get to hold those moments.

Back to the writing, I feel that these two perspectives are a full circle. On one side, a patient who is frightened, frustrated, and grieving the time she may lose. On the other, a doctor who carries the weight of knowing his skills cannot save everyone, yet still tries to make each person’s remaining time meaningful.

Gawande also explained that people have goals beyond simply living longer. Those goals differ from one person to another, and they change over time. The only reliable way to understand them is to ask. But doctors do not ask often enough. When care does not match a patient’s priorities, suffering grows.

I do not have a conclusion after reading and listening to all this. It is simply eye-opening to see the fears, limits, and dilemmas from both sides. It made me feel for the patient’s sadness, but also recognize the strain on the people trying to help.