Max Jared Bajer

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes! Most women lose feeling in their chest after a mastectomy, and almost no one warns them ahead of time. Emily Hansen, a patient advocate who has spent nearly two decades in health care communication working with surgeons and breast cancer survivors, joins to explain a consequence of survivorship that stays largely hidden.

Her door was always closed. Every other mother on that maternity ward had hers open. You could hear them from the hallway: the soft sounds of newborns, the low voices of partners and grandmothers, the particular exhausted joy of those first hours. Nurses moved in and out freely. Students stopped to peek, to congratulate, to practice the small rituals of care that we were there to learn. The ward had a warmth to it that I hadn’t expected, a feeling of life pressing forward. Her door stayed shut.

Every day, I am invited into the most intimate and vulnerable chapters of another person’s life. Chapters no one ever plans for, marked by fear, grief, courage, and extraordinary love. I have sat across from a 64-year-old man newly diagnosed with prostate cancer and watched tears fall from his eyes for the first time in over a decade. I have seen trembling hands of a young woman reach instinctively for her mother after hearing that a scan revealed brain metastases from lung cancer.