Cancer Stories: The Art Of Oncology

Listen to ASCO’s Journal of Clinical Oncology essay, “Three Days was Enough” by Dr. Teresa Thomas, Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing. The essay is followed by an interview with Thomas and host Dr. Lidia Schapira. Having medically adjacent experience, Thomas shares her personal story of helping her family come to terms with hospice care for her father. TRANSCRIPT Narrator: Three Days Was Enough, by Teresa Hagan Thomas, PhD, BA, RN  My dad agreed to receive hospice on a technicality. It happened after weeks of trying to get him home oxygen. My brother drove him to the oncologist’s office, and I helped him get into the wheelchair. He did not complain, but just asked me to hold his coffee mug, smiling because I snuck him a fresh donut. Three months before, dad was well-maintained on treatment for a neuroendocrine tumor. It was not until two separate, non–cancer-related hospital admissions kept him off treatment that the cancer saw a chance to hijack his body, take over his or