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Eight months into my fellowship, and my first patient is still alive. Starting a fellowship at a new institution has been similar to starting my residency, however with a slightly hardened exterior that an inner city internal medicine residency program provides. As with my first patient, it was also my first time in the cancer center when I met her—for me, as a clinician; for her, as a patient. She presented the way many lung cancer patients do; a pneumonia that wouldn’t go away. She thought it was just a cold, but her extensive smoking history, weight loss, and persistent symptoms indicated something much more sinister was lurking beneath the surface. Imaging suggested what she feared, and a biopsy proved it. She had metastatic lung adenocarcinoma. Her next few weeks were a crash course in oncology- PET/CT’s, chemotherapy, and enrollment in clinical trials and plowing through with their lengthy consent forms. We were going through the same process from different perspectives...
*For a PDF of the full article, click on the link to the left of this introduction.
Eight months into my fellowship, and my first patient is still alive. Starting a fellowship at a new institution has been similar to starting my residency, however with a slightly hardened exterior that an inner city internal medicine residency program provides. As with my first patient, it was also my first time in the cancer center when I met her—for me, as a clinician; for her, as a patient. She presented the way many lung cancer patients do; a pneumonia that wouldn’t go away. She thought it was just a cold, but her extensive smoking history, weight loss, and persistent symptoms indicated something much more sinister was lurking beneath the surface. Imaging suggested what she feared, and a biopsy proved it. She had metastatic lung adenocarcinoma. Her next few weeks were a crash course in oncology- PET/CT’s, chemotherapy, and enrollment in clinical trials and plowing through with their lengthy consent forms. We were going through the same process from different perspectives...
*For a PDF of the full article, click on the link to the left of this introduction.
Eight months into my fellowship, and my first patient is still alive. Starting a fellowship at a new institution has been similar to starting my residency, however with a slightly hardened exterior that an inner city internal medicine residency program provides. As with my first patient, it was also my first time in the cancer center when I met her—for me, as a clinician; for her, as a patient. She presented the way many lung cancer patients do; a pneumonia that wouldn’t go away. She thought it was just a cold, but her extensive smoking history, weight loss, and persistent symptoms indicated something much more sinister was lurking beneath the surface. Imaging suggested what she feared, and a biopsy proved it. She had metastatic lung adenocarcinoma. Her next few weeks were a crash course in oncology- PET/CT’s, chemotherapy, and enrollment in clinical trials and plowing through with their lengthy consent forms. We were going through the same process from different perspectives...
*For a PDF of the full article, click on the link to the left of this introduction.