Recognizing the humanity, remembering the person

Recognizing the humanity, remembering the person

Treating patients as more than problems 'dying' for a solution

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We forget about people. In the midst of pain, in the ugliness of suffering — we have lost the person.

Cancer has a face, and cancer patients all have a story.

It’s a grandmother, a mother, a wife, a sister, an aunt, a cousin, a daughter.

It’s a person — a living, breathing, feeling human.  

It’s not always a happy ending, but that does not mean we get to skip to the end of the stories we choose to listen to. There is something to be learned — no matter what the outcome may be. Through the pain, we can heal — together — using grief as a guide out of the darkness.

Together — they are all survivors and should be treated as such. No matter how a person chooses to handle their illness, their disease, their pain — their story — it is up to everyone to see that they are treated professionally, but with sympathy and passion.

They must be treated as people.

Victoria Amy Stern Whelan was a sister, a wife, a mother, a cousin, a daughter, and an actress.

Joseph Stern

Victoria was a cancer patient, and her story lives on.

“Leukemia’s not going to get me,” Victoria said, putting on a brave face for her brother Joseph Stern, M.D.

After years of not speaking to her family and pushing away visitors, Victoria decided to let her older brother — a neurosurgeon — travel across the country to see her during treatment at City of Hope, a cancer hospital in Los Angeles, California.

A doctor, Joseph was used to scrubbing his hands before entering restricted areas. Joseph should have been used to wearing gloves and gowns. Only this time, it was different. Joseph was going to see his kid sister — the patient.

“As I entered her hospital room for the first time, I was afraid I would disappoint her,” Joseph wrote in an article for The New York Times. “…But Victoria and I grinned at each other through our masks, and her eyes twinkled with the pleasure of a long-anticipated reunion.”

Cancer.gov/ City of Hope

Stripped of his physician’s status, Joseph was forced into the world of pain, grief, vulnerability, and support as he sat with his sister day after day.

“I was aware of the consuming and unrelenting fear that patients carry with them and cannot shake,” Joseph wrote. “I was no longer the doctor dropping in on rounds, calling the shots.”

Victoria refused to discuss her mortality with anyone — “it was off the table.” So, she decided to “conquer whatever the medical team asked of her.”

“Sitting with Victoria allowed me to reconnect with a part of myself I had been suppressing for years,” Joseph wrote. “Her courage rubbed off on me. …I went to City of Hope to support my sister, and what I found there was gratitude: appreciation for others; reveling in small pleasures we usually take for granted, like a hot shower, sunlight, a walk outdoors. Victoria’s gift was a tangible lesson, something I have been able to carry with me. Now I approach patients differently than I did before her illness.”

Without this pain, without Victoria’s life and death, Joseph would not have been able to treat Meghan White, a 34-year old woman with breast cancer that had spread to her brain, as more than a patient.

Like Victoria, Meghan was battling cancer; however, her humanness was not lost amidst the tests, the poking, the prodding.

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Rather than see her as a victim, Joseph saw her as a survivor.

“Previously, I would have thought nothing of her shaved head, but now I understood Meghan had a story to tell,” Joseph wrote. “As they were with Victoria, the odds were long against her.”

Meghan: a daughter, a fourth-grade teacher — who taught more than just her students.

“I never used to cry when speaking with patients,” Joseph wrote. “I would gird myself, push forward, distract myself with new and pressing problems to fix; I focused on technical, rather than human, matters. Now, I told Meghan that I would cry for us both. My sister was present in that room, in the patient sitting before me and in the way I was newly able to comfort and reassure her. …My sister showed me how to become a better brother and, at the same time, a better doctor.”

We all can and should strive to be better.

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There is power in pain, and there is more power in acknowledging pain exists. There is power in treating people as more than problems in need of a solution.

Dr. Rita Charon, originator of the burgeoning field of narrative medicine, believes it is necessary for doctors to see their patients are more than problems dying for a solution.

“This is not a dream,” Charon said. “This is real.”

Sharing her story of treating patients with audiences, Charon urges for the merging of humanity, science, medical care, and technology — the abstract and concrete.

Charon spends her days working in a hospital where she can tell what is wrong with someone as soon as they get off the elevator; however, she argues that doctors must see beyond the “fixable” and learn how to “see beyond the bleeding and the seizing.”

“We need to see the complex, lived experience,” Charon said. “If we do not, we miss the very reasons they come to us.”

Joseph Stern learned how to treat patients and see beyond the problem. While his sister did not want to share her story on her own, Stern was able to carry on a legacy of care and understanding through his work.

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Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet Audre Lorde took another approach to her cancer — being silent was not an option, so she gave voice to her thoughts, her pain, her deepest emotions through her writing. 

“It is not my intention to judge the woman who has chosen the path of prosthesis, of silence and invisibility, the woman who wishes to be ‘the same as before.’ She has survived on another kind of courage, and she is not alone,” Lorde wrote (The Cancer Journals, 8). “Each of us struggles daily with the pressures of conformity and the loneliness of difference from which those choices seem to offer escape. I only know that those choices do not work for me, nor for other women who, not without fear, have survived cancer by scrutinizing its meaning within our lives, and by attempting to integrate this crisis into useful strengths for change.”

Although Lorde’s experience with cancer was not without its pain, her work begs for the need to recognize each person’s humanity.

Regardless of how pain is dealt with, it cannot be ignored.

Pain touches us all in some way, but that does not mean we should ignore it, stigmatize it, or pretend it’s not there.

Pain is felt — by people — and ignoring it doesn’t change the fact that there is someone on the other end of that suffering.

And by treating people like problems, only more pain and suffering is created — wrecking more and more havoc as we forget theirs and our own humanity — out of convenience. 

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There is not much to learn from cancer. The learning must be through those who fight it.

Through their teachings, we must learn how to be humans again, how to feel again.

Then, we will learn how to heal again.

Their pain matters. Their stories matter. Listen. Remember.

Course reading: Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. Aunt Lute Books, 2006.