The radiology tech waved me into his cozy dark room filled with bright screens. It’s usually off-limits to patients, but maybe he knew I was a local doctor and faculty member at Harvard Medical School, which can occasionally get me a backstage pass. With a smirk, he told me I should eat something, pointing at the air in my stomach on the X-rays he had taken moments earlier.

I’d had surgery to remove three metastatic tumors from my lungs just hours before, and every breath ended with a wince. Food was not on my mind, but the tech had made me smile — air in the stomach usually signals that the patient needs to burp, not hunger. I began thinking about the potential for a case report in The New England Journal — 34-year-old man with metastatic renal cell carcinoma needs a burp.

Back in my hospital room, my mind went to the last time I found myself in a radiology reading room. It was Jan. 19, 2018, and I was looking at my own CT scan images late on a Friday afternoon, self-diagnosing the emotionally incomprehensible image before me as kidney cancer just minutes before my primary care doctor called back with the results. I called my brother and kept him on the phone with me for as long as I could, and still it was the most alone I have ever felt. My doctor told me that the radiologist said it was Stage 3, which meant that it could potentially be cured with surgical removal of my kidney. There were tiny nodules in my lungs, but they were too small to say anything definitive about.

…continue reading ‘Lessons From Behind the Curtain’

Image: By Christ Thanoh Klam – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73578749

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