My patient Betsy Lewis has found the balance in which we neither welcome death nor push it away – and still celebrates her life while she can
Ican remember many things about the afternoon I told Betsy that she had stage IV lung cancer.
I can still see how the single ray of sunshine from the skylight in the atrium behind us entered the crack between the curtains in her hospital room, shooting right through the crystalline IV bag hanging from the pole next to her, turning it into a depressing sort of disco ball.
I can still hear the sardonic laugh we shared about the unwieldy chest tube emerging from between her ribs that was slowly re-inflating her lung after a biopsy had caused it to partially collapse.
But, as her oncologist, what I remember most clearly was her outward equanimity about it all. She was 72 years old, divorced, fierce and sarcastic. She’d later tell me how caring for her mother as she’d slowly declined with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease had put her “firmly in the quality over quantity camp”.
