Cancer Stories: The Art Of Oncology

Listen to ASCO’s Journal of Clinical Oncology essay, “A Labor of Love” by Dr. Rebecca Kowaloff, a Palliative Care Attending at the University of Massachusetts. The essay is followed by an interview with Kowaloff and host Dr. Lidia Schapira. Kowaloff shares how she connects and supports young patients and families at the end of life. TRANSCRIPT Narrator: A Labor of Love, by Rebecca Kowaloff  I had always thought that I gave too much space for death at the bedside of my patients. More than most of my medical colleagues, I seemed to accept its inevitability and had learned to talk about it, to watch it, and to sit with it. I did not cry, even for the patients robbed in their middle age by cancers sucking their life from within, aging them in hyperspeed before my eyes. Why did the weight not feel heavier to me when so many around me seemed unable to carry it? Despite the frailty of his body when we met, caring for Michael showed me my strength. He was a 25-year-old investment banker on Wall Street when he was dia