Emails from our Oncologist

I was wrong about Jenny’s oncologist.  He replied my email. I was half expecting him to ignore it, and trashing it, after all I am no more a paying client. And battling cancer makes him a busy man.

But not for the first time since losing Jenny, my outlook on life and people in general, has taken a cynical and negative bent. Only that this time, I was wrong. I underestimated his professional pride.

He replied within a day of my writing to him. I was complaining why he had not shared the information about clinical trials on a new form of chemotherapy carried out at the National University Cancer Institute throughout the months he was treating Jenny. I felt that it could have made a life-and-death difference for my dear wife.

He started with some words of sympathy for my deep loss. Then he explained that “up to the time of Jenny’s diagnosis, there was no published data that intra-peritoneal chemotherapy produced any added survival benefit”. 

But he mentioned also that the study was “in reality… done on a very select group of patients and is not the magic bullet as it was made out to be”. He felt that the newspaper report of the study was “sensationalised”.

The email finished with an assurance that Jenny was given the best available treatment at the time of her diagnosis. And he offered me his deepest condolences.

I read his email reply a few times over - “Sensational way the study was described…”, “..not the magic bullet it was made out to be”. 

Who should I believe? The doctor was obviously protecting his professional pride. But have I also read too much in the newspaper report of the clinical trial?

The next morning I opened my email again. Apparently shortly after writing the first email he sent me a second one, asking to “indulge” him with the “time to share a few thoughts”.

He wrote that he was upset over the newspaper report for the “unnecessary emotional pain” it has caused me, “reopening a deep wound in the heart”. He further shared that “this was not the first time that sensational reporting in the media has affected cancer patients and their families causing confusion and sometimes, distress”.

He finished this second email with an offer to meet up with me “to talk over this if it will remove the guilt it may have unjustifiably caused in (my) heart.”

So should I take up his offer to meet?

Perhaps in the meeting he could run through a gastric cancer 101 to help me understand the complexities of chemotherapy treatment – intra-peritoneal, as tried out in the NCIS study versus the conventional infusion given to Jenny.  But would knowing more help assuage my pain? He was right about the report “reopening a deep wound” in my heart.  Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. I might be better off not knowing too much.

But he has proven me wrong by taking the trouble to write to me. And the tone of his reply was sincere enough, empathic of my situation. He has rightly sensed that I had first written to him largely out of frustration. And perhaps, guilt. Guilt that he had hoped that by talking to me he could help “remove”.

I knew that an apology was in order. It was unfair to pin the blame on him for Jenny’s predicament. No oncologist can guarantee recovery from a disease as deadly as cancer.  So I humbly replied him as such.

Oncologists, especially those in private practice, occupy the highest income brackets in the medical profession, arguably so. But perhaps it is fair compensation. Considering that their job requires them to stare into the face of death each day.  Whenever they look into the eyes of their patients. No other medical profession comes with the same cruel intensity.  Cancer is such a frightful killer and the path to finding a cure to date remains harder as ever. It is the holy grail of modern medicine.

But noble as it is, and for all the money they earn, I think it is really a very sad profession.  Seeing your patients die one by one, as many eventually would.  And having to deal with the broken hearts left behind.