David Rieff writes about his mother Susan Sontag’s battle with cancer, medical futility, the instilling of hope against odds, and the outer reaches of experimental oncology:
For doctors, understanding and figuring out how to respond to an individual patient’s perspective – continue to fight for life when chances of survival are slim, or acquiesce and try to make the best of whatever time remains? – can be almost as grave a responsibility as the more scientific challenge of treating disease. In trying to come to terms with my mother’s death, I wanted to understand the work of the oncologists who treated her and what treating her meant to them, both humanly and scientifically. What chance was there really of translating a patient’s hope for survival into the reality of a cure? One common thread in what they told me was that interpreting a patient’s wishes is as much art as science.” (New York Times Magazine)
