It was 2 a.m. And Rebecca Shatsky, MD, could not sleep.
The breast oncologist was thinking about a patient of hers with metastatic cancer.
The patient’s disease had been asymptomatic for some time. Then without warning, her cancer suddenly exploded. Her bone marrow was failing, and her liver was not far behind.
Dr. Shatsky had a treatment plan ready to go but still, she felt uneasy.
“I had to be honest with her that I didn’t know if this plan would work,” says Dr. Shatsky, a medical oncologist at University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
That night, after visiting the patient in the hospital, Dr. Shatsky lay awake going over her next move, making sure it was the right one and hoping it would help keep the disease at bay.
“It’s so much pressure when someone is depending on you to make life or death decisions,” Dr. Shatsky said.
And in the quiet hours of night, these concerns grow louder.
Dr. Shatsky is not alone.
“There’s no off button,” says Aaron Goodman, MD, a hematologist at UCSD Health who goes by “Papa Heme” on Twitter. “I’m always thinking about my patients. Constantly.”
The public rarely gets a glimpse of these private moments. On occasion, oncologists will share a personal story, but more often, insights come from broad research on the ethical, emotional, and psychological toll of practicing medicine.
Many oncologists carry this baggage home with them because they have no other option.
“There is simply no time to process the weight of the day when I’ve got seven more patients who need my full attention before lunch,” Mark Lewis, MD, director, department of gastrointestinal oncology, Intermountain Healthcare, Salt Lake City, Utah. “That is why my processing happens outside of the office, when my brain can be quiet.”
What am I missing?
Dr. Goodman recognizes the gravity of each decision he makes. He pores over every detail of a patient’s scans, lab results, history, and symptoms.
But no matter how many times he checks and rechecks, one question nags at him: What am I missing?
For Dr. Goodman, this exhaustive level of attention is worth it.
“When errors are made, it’s someone’s life,” Dr. Goodman said. “Nothing would have prepared me for this responsibility. Until it lies on you, it’s impossible to understand how much trust patients put into us.”
That trust becomes most apparent for Dr. Goodman when facing a decision about how to treat a patient with acute myeloid leukemia who’s in remission.
Give more chemotherapy to root out the leukemia cells still lurking in the body, and the patient faces a high risk of the cancer returning. Pick stem cell transplant, and the chance of being cured goes up significantly, but the patient could also die within 100 days of the transplant.
“All together, the data show I’m helping patients with a transplant, but for the individual, I could be causing harm. Someone could be living less because of a decision I made,” Dr. Goodman said.
For patients with advanced cancer, oncologists may need to think several moves ahead. Mapping out a patient’s treatment options can feel like a game of chess. Dr. Shatsky is always trying to anticipate how the tumor will behave, what is driving it, and how lifestyle factors may influence a patient’s response in the present and the future.
“It is a mind game,” she says. “Like in chess, I try to outsmart my opponent. But with advanced cancer, there are not necessarily clear-cut guidelines or one way to manage the disease, and I have to do the best I can with drugs I have.”
That’s the art of oncology: Balancing the many knowns and unknowns of a person’s cancer alongside the toxicities of treatment and a patient’s hopes and goals.
Throughout the year, Don Dizon, MD, will see a number of patients with advanced disease. In these instances, the question he often wrestles with is if the patient can’t be cured, whether more treatment will just cause greater harm.
Dr. Dizon recently faced this dilemma with an older patient with metastatic disease who had not done well with an initial treatment regimen. After outlining the risks for more chemotherapy, he explained one option would be to forgo it and simply treat her symptoms.
“It’s an impossible choice,” says Dr. Dizon, director of women’s cancers at Lifespan Cancer Institute and director of medical oncology at Rhode Island Hospital, Providence.
Chemotherapy can provide symptom relief, but it can also be toxic – and patients may be so frail, they can die from more therapy.
“I told my patient, if in your heart, you want to try more therapy, that’s okay. But it’s also okay if you don’t,” Dr. Dizon recalled.
Her response: “You’re supposed to give me the answer.”
However, for patients approaching the end of life, there often is no right answer.
“It’s part of the discomfort you live with as a patient and oncologist, and when I leave the clinic, that’s one thing that follows me home,” Dr. Dizon said. “At the end of the day, I need to look in the mirror and know I did the best I could.”