Hot Flashes in a Cold World

Being a physician and a patient with cancer places me in the rather unique position of being able to educate others about prostate cancer from the vantage point of a physician who has cancer, and exploring and sharing those emotions common to all cancer patients, many of which are so often not talked about and most often not dealt with. This wearing of two hats, as it were, allows me to relate the dizzying day-by-day rollercoaster of my emotions through the course of diagnosis,...
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Being a physician and a patient with cancer places me in the rather unique position of being able to educate others about prostate cancer from the vantage point of a physician who has cancer, and exploring and sharing those emotions common to all cancer patients, many of which are so often not talked about and most often not dealt with. This wearing of two hats, as it were, allows me to relate the dizzying day-by-day rollercoaster of my emotions through the course of diagnosis, treatment and its aftermath. I write not just as a patient but as a physician who is a patient, and about how being a physician adds another dimension to an otherwise not so unusual story; and if, in telling my story, I can help one other person deal a little bit better with his illness, and one other physician deal a little bit better with his cancer patients, then this writing will have served its purpose. My readers will be all of us since we will, all, at some time, have to deal with a life- threatening illness: its treatment, its consequences; its effect on those friends and families who share the event, and are affected by it in such myriad ways. We will experience how devastating it can be, but also how it can be survived (for however long). I can relate how one person experienced this ordeal; and how that one person, being a physician as well as a patient, can offer his experiences, not only for the benefit of patients and families but for physicians as well, with and without cancer.