0 penilaian0% menganggap dokumen ini bermanfaat (0 suara)
41 tayangan1 halaman
Sally kohn: as a young girl, I often accompanied my dad to the hospital on Sundays. Kohn remembers how much she wanted to be like her father, for most of her life. She says her father was a consummate surgeon, and she aspired to be like him.
Sally kohn: as a young girl, I often accompanied my dad to the hospital on Sundays. Kohn remembers how much she wanted to be like her father, for most of her life. She says her father was a consummate surgeon, and she aspired to be like him.
Sally kohn: as a young girl, I often accompanied my dad to the hospital on Sundays. Kohn remembers how much she wanted to be like her father, for most of her life. She says her father was a consummate surgeon, and she aspired to be like him.
ther, general surgeon, to the hospital on Sundays. My older sister and youngest brother and I rode the wheelchairs parked at the hospital entrance (until someone inevitably told us to stop) while my dad would "make rounds." As I watched him walk down the hospital corridor and through two swing ing doors, I'd imagine him going in circles. He would return just when we were getting bored and take us to the 7-Eleven for Slurpees and penny candy. That's all I knew of my father's profession. Only in very general terms did I understand what a doctor was. My father's even keel and reticent demeanor is such that we never knew when he lost a patient or spent all day in the operating room on a complicated case. He never brought home details of dif ficult cases, and my seven siblings and I monopolized the din ner conversation with stories from school. The stories of his work became his unintentional secret Twenty-five years later, his secret was revealed. He observed while I underwent a CT scan and then an ultrasound at the hospital where he was on staff, and he was the one who told me the results: the cancer we'd thought we were rid of (after five years free of the disease) had recurred. He explained my diagnosis by making circles on his chest to show me where the cancer had grown back. I recall the elegance of those long fingers tapping on his striped shirt as we sat in his hospital's ultrasound waiting area. Their fluid motion re vealed to me the consummate surgeon that my dark-haired,
When I
was a
soulful-eyed father wascalm, direct, deliberate.
I imagined the tumors as perfectly round because that's
how he "drew" them.
He said that my oncologist would probably want to remove them surgically. I said, "Let's just do whatever we have to do to fix it," and in that moment I realized how much I wanted, for most of my life, to be like him. I felt the admiration so many of his patients had felt and told me about on the few occasions I worked in his office. I wanted to search for a so lution rather than give in to self-pity; I wanted to show strength. That desire served me well that day. I was shocked and shaky but nevertheless determined. Cancer is a sinister disease, but I believe it brings with it an honesty one might otherwise never know. From my father I inherited the will to live methodically. It means, as we have often said in my family, "doing what has to be done" to solve a problem or to achieve a goal. My father spent the week between the news and my appointment to see my oncologist by collecting information from other oncolo gists at some of the best cancer centers around the country. How would they treat my condition? It essentially came down to whether to do surgery or chemotherapy. Only one doctor
recommended surgery; the others said chemotherapy first.
The catch was that because the kind of tumors I had were relatively rare (hemangiopericytomas), there was no clinical evidence to prove statistically that chemotherapy alone was a successful treatment. A few days before my appointment, we discussed this in the family room of my childhood home, my father looking a bit shrunken on the couch as I swiveled nervously in the chair next to him. There was a chance this couldn't work, I repeated out loud. For a moment's pause I looked beyond him and through the window to the backyard. I think I wanted to look as far away as I could, or more likely, fast forward into the future for an answer. Then I looked back to him, and in his softening brown eyes I saw that my fear was his, too, but he said we couldn't think about it that way. He voiced a deep and resonant determination at my weakest moment, and I was lifted over an enormous hurdle. When my oncologist, the one who'd performed the first sur gery five years ago, recommended a second surgery to remove the tumors, my father wanted one last opinion from one more oncologist. I was ready for the surgery; it seemed a clear and swift solution, but my father needed something else. Looking back, I think it was a reassurance no one could provide. A day later, however, he told me to call my doctor and schedule the surgery. My mother had pointed out that it was time for my father to step aside, to let the doctor do what he was supposed to do. It must have been a difficult moment for him. My mother, knowing him as well as she does, knew he needed to let go, to accept what was now out of his hands. Now we were both vulnerable to chance. There was no such thing as making our own luck. We had to rely on luck. I wonder what it was like for him to sit in the family wait ing room at the hospital (where he was not on staff), knowing as much as he did. I wonder if his hands felt the urge to move to the motion of the incision, where he'd first pointed to the tumors' location. I wonder if he visualized the cancer squeez ing against my organ tissue. I have had the luxury of select ing what I want to know about this disease. From the begin ning, he has known too much. That has been my advantage, though. Through my postop erative recovery and the follow-up chemotherapy, he has been, as a physician and my father, my medical interpreter and my ultimate protector. Now I know how he must have touched people on those Sunday morning rounds. And I un derstand why so much was left unspoken. Many of the stories of his work have no neat beginning, middle, and end. Perhaps that's something he didn't want his children to know just yet. Anne Broccolo Northbrook, Ill
We welcome contributions to A Piece of My Mind. Manuscripts
should be sent to Roxanne . Young, The Journal of the American State St, Chicago, IL 60610. Medical Association, 515
Downloaded From: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/ by a Princeton University User on 11/04/2015