Six years ago, I Vincent was diagnosed with life-threatening prostate cancer that would have killed most men. I survived because I was able to call on colleagues to deliver aggressive surgery outside the standard of care hormone therapy for my type of disease. Without a doubt, the operation saved my life. When I was a child in the s, long before I had any notion of becoming an oncologist, Aunt Violet, my godmother and a frequent visitor in my household, stopped coming over.
My parents ceased talking about her, too. It was as if she had disappeared. Several months later, my father told me that she was sick and that she wanted to see me. I looked up when I heard the bedroom door open. Aunt Violet was quiet, gaunt and sad. Her skin looked yellow next to her white chenille bathrobe.
I was only six, but I knew something was terribly wrong. Her case had apparently been so advanced by the time she was diagnosed that there was little her doctors could do. The main treatments were surgeries that were often disfiguring or toxic doses of radiation.
Those treatments helped only the lucky few whose cancers were discovered before they had spread. There were no drugs to fight cancer then. And barely more than a third of people diagnosed with it survived. There, I saw a lot of people who looked just like Aunt Violet had at the end of her life.
As late as the s, the respected chief of medicine at Columbia University refused to let his medical trainees make rounds on the cancer wards, lest their careers be tainted by the futility they would encounter there.
