Some weeks, standing at the stove feels like climbing a mountain.

Maybe you are in the middle of chemotherapy. Maybe an autoimmune flare has knocked the wind out of you, or a new diagnosis has hijack...

I want to start with two conversations.

The first was with a woman who had been diagnosed with breast cancer six days earlier. She sat down, unfolded a printout she had been carrying in her purse, an...

Nobody hands you a badge.

There is no ceremony, no start date, no orientation packet. One day you are a daughter or a husband or a brother, and then there is a phone call, or a scan result, or a fall...

There is a chair in almost every exam room that nobody talks about.

The patient sits on the table. We talk about scans and labs, the next infusion, the side effects, the plan for the next six weeks. ...

There is a moment we watch for on almost every call, and most people have no idea we are watching for it.

It comes when someone says, “Hold on, let me go grab my medication list.” They put both hands...

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being at odds with your own stomach.

Most of the people we work with can describe it exactly. The morning after an infusion. The third day of a ...

A woman I saw not long after her diagnosis told me that her oncologist had encouraged her to focus on self-care. She nodded in the appointment the way most of us nod when we do not want to seem diffic...

There is a moment I see that almost nobody writes about.

The patient is talking. The specialist is talking. Scans, cycles, counts, side effects, next steps. And off to the side, in the second chair, ...

There is a detail that comes up in our conversations more often than any number on a lab report. Somewhere in the middle of talking about scans and treatment plans, someone mentions, almost in passing...

A gentle, evidence based guide to bland foods, hydration, and getting back to real eating, from two physicians who sit with people in the hardest weeks of treatment.

A few years ago I sat with a woma...

There is a particular kind of quiet that arrives after a diagnosis.

It is not the peaceful kind. It is the kind that shows up when the calendar empties out. Work gets handed off. The gym membership g...

We have sat across the table from hundreds of people who just heard the word cancer for the first time. And almost without exception, once the initial shock settles, the same question surfaces: “What ...