Recently, I was at the UCSF CANCER CENTER on a Friday afternoon and it was bustling. No weekends off, I guess. I had recently listened to Terry Gross on NPR. She is the best interviewer that I know and her interview of oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee chronicled how our understanding of cancer had evolved in his book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.
The doc/author, whose ethnicity has absolutely nothing to do with my comments, other than I can't pronounce or spell his name and suddenly thought of this: It is always kind of humorous to me that many Americans of various ethnicities will give themselves easy to remember typical American names: here's a few I know: Carman, Tiffany, Leisa, Camela, Jimmy, John. I once asked Jimmy who is a 2d generation Chinese and runs this great coffee shop called, Coffee Break, "Jimmy, who gave you that name?" He smiled, "A Mother who loves me.
Anyway, with those inane comments aside, the author early in his interview, talked about a patient that asked him a question that inevitably led to why he wrote the book. She had responded and relapsed, responded and relapsed, and was about to undergo this horrendous treatment. I can only imagine: loss of hair, nausea so bad one wants to die--on and on. She said something like, "I'm willing to go on but I need to know what I'm facing."
This was Rose. She wanted to know and came with her spiral notebook filled with questions.
