Cancer Stories: The Art Of Oncology

Listen to ASCO’s Journal of Clinical Oncology Art of Oncology poem, "Rain Talk” by Dr. Karl Lorenz, who is a palliative care and primary care physician and Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. The poem is followed by an interview with Lorenz and host Dr. Lidia Schapira. TRANSCRIPT Narrator: Rain Talk, by Karl A. Lorenz, MD, MSHS   Rain splattering, a cacophony of glassy dollops plopping, sliding, colliding, crashing, plashing melted pearls. Drops careening, onto the ground now streaming, seeking, trickling, slowing, flowing into a rill of connections.   Water nourishing blades of grass becomes a field of forage, or the smallest sprout of a redwood fairy circle. Life springs forth from the pitter patter, as words too, joined in thoughts, converge, merge, spill, flow into action.   You lay cancerous, stoically shrouded. I stood frozen, purged of words, anxious amid the pulse, beep, thrum, dry rustle of nurses’ coming and going. A stiff-coated doctor fractured the quiet— “I wish things were different.”