Cancer Stories: The Art Of Oncology

Listen to ASCO’s Journal of Clinical Oncology poem, “Etch a Sketch” by Dr. Wendy Tong, an Internal Medicine Resident at McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University. The poem is followed by an interview with Tong and host Dr. Lidia Schapira. Tong shares her thought process behind her fictional poem, where a mother and daughter receive bad news of a leukemia diagnoses. TRANSCRIPT Narrator: Etch a Sketch, by Wendy Tong, MD  You are only seventeen when you first learn its meaning.Just moments before, you sit in a white-walled roomwith your mother by your side. You have been losing weight.You have been feeling dizzy; you have been bedbound with colds.You have been waking up with the taste of blood,finding dried crimson on your pillowand tiny red freckles smattering your skin.  In the middle of the waiting your mind drifts backto when you were younger, when the thing you liked bestto play with was an etch a sketch. You would maneuver the knobsto draw lineographic pictures with an invisible stylus—a whole worl