Cancer Stories: The Art Of Oncology

Listen to ASCO’s Journal of Clinical Oncology essay, “The Gift of Truth” by Dr. Ilana Hellmann, an Attending Physician in the Hematology Department at Meir Medical Center in Israel. The essay is followed by an interview with Hellmann and host Dr. Lidia Schapira. Hellmann shares how it is an immense privilege and grave responsibility for physicians to give bad news to patients who have a terminal disease. TRANSCRIPT It was a hot and humid Tuesday in July, and I distinctly remember being grateful for the air conditioning in the pastel-shaded waiting room of the oncology outpatient clinic. My father sat silently beside me. We knew this room well, as we did the doctor we had arrived to see. He had been my late mother’s oncologist until she had passed away just over a year previously from metastatic breast cancer. Dad remembered him being kind yet direct and had requested that he be his oncologist now that he needed one. I watched his hands fidget with the slip of paper bearing the number that would be called ove