Transformation

My medical oncologist was a little boy the first time we met him, when he visited us in Jerusalem with his parents, good friends of ours, and his older brother. I couldn’t know, of course, that roughly forty years later I would be hanging on this child’s every word. My wife and I met him again last Friday at the Sidney Kimmel Center for Prostate and Urologic Cancers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital, where he is engaged in research concerning prostate cancer metastases to the bone and to the lymph nodes.

Now a distinguished medical researcher, the former little boy is a man of medium height, trim physique, and a neat beard, who displays both intensity of focus and warmth of personality. He explained the nature of my disease and the treatments available, impressing us by his knowledge, his ability to convey clearly what we needed to know, and his compassion. During his physical examination, he revealed what’s been called a “healing touch,” hard to define but easy to recognize. I'm in the best possible hands.

He transformed my understanding of my disease. Instead of looking at my metastasis as a fatal disease whose progress can be slowed, he views it as a chronic disease, like hypertension and COPD, that can be managed. Since a man my age has a pretty limited life expectancy in any case, the two views may amount to the same thing, but his way of looking at my disease is, of course, much more attractive. So I will have to give up the romantic view of myself as suffering from an incurable, fatal disease and return to the ranks of ordinary mortals. It’s a move I’m happy to make.

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