Cancer Stories: The Art Of Oncology

Listen to ASCO’s Journal of Clinical Oncology essay, “Afternoons in the Tower of Babel” by Barry Meisenberg, Chair of Medicine and Director of Academic Affairs at Luminis Health. The essay is followed by an interview with Meisenberg and host Dr. Lidia Schapira. Meisenberg describes how oncologists and families of patients in the ICU lack a common language when discussing status and prognosis. TRANSCRIPT Narrator: Afternoons in the Tower of Babel, by Barry R. Meisenberg, MD (10.1200/JCO.23.00587)  We talked for hours in that little windowless room adjacent to the intensive care unit (ICU) during his final week. A patient dying of a toxicity that should have been treatable, but is not. The oncologist's tasks: to care for the man in the ICU bed by caring for his family; to knit up the raveled opinions of the many consultants; to forge from these strands a family's understanding of status and prognosis; to be a family's ambassador in the ICU, while others toil to adjust the machines and monitor the urine flow;