Living as a cancer surpriser: a doctor tells his story

Shortly before his death in 1995, Kenneth B. Schwartz, a cancer patient at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), founded the Kenneth B. Schwartz Center. The Schwartz Center is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and advancing compassionate health care delivery, which provides hope to the patient, support to the caregivers, and sustenance to the healing process. The center sponsors the Schwartz Center Rounds, a monthly multidisciplinary forum where caregivers reflect on important psychosocial issues faced by patients, their families, and their caregivers and gain insight and support from fellow staff members. We tell the story of one physician with incurable non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who had an unexpectedly favorable response to an experimental treatment while receiving it as a part of his palliative care. His unique insight provides an opportunity to elucidate some of the issues that arise from living both as a patient-caregiver and as a cancer "surpriser." When caregivers face their own cancer, their reflections as patient-caregivers offer an internal perspective on the illness experience and help us as fellow caregivers to better understand and support all patients who face serious illnesses, both those who are colleagues and those who are not. Just like any patient with cancer, patient-caregivers experience the dramatic changes in health, daily life, and perspective that come with serious illness. Within the context of a life-threatening illness, caregiver-patients and their families search for new meaning as they face an uncertain future and address the issues of life and death. In addition to such processes, patient-caregivers with cancer also find that their own medical knowledge and their colleagues' reactions shape their experiences and to an extent separate them from those of other patients.