Riding the Cancer Roller Coaster

“Treating cancer is like riding a roller coaster: a rattling, bumpy journey filled with deep plunges and tremendous highs that seem like they might last forever,” writes Cleveland Clinic Cancer Center oncologist Suneel Kamath, MD, in a new column for U.S. News & World Report. “It’s difficult but important to avoid congratulating yourself too much at the high points and punishing yourself too much at the lows. As Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ says, we must “meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same.”

Dr. Kamath uses the varied clinical courses of two of his cancer patients to illustrate that expected outcomes — whether good or bad — aren’t always assured. Read the full column here.