Christopher Booth walks into the examination room with a warm smile, pulls up a chair close to his patient, and leans in. He doesn’t check notes on a clipboard, doesn’t glance at a computer screen. He studies his charts thoroughly before entering so that patients have his full attention. Booth, a medical oncologist and professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, specializes in gastrointestinal cancer. Most of the people he treats have advanced disease. In this Friday-morning clinic, he will see nine patients, most with complex cases.
A woman in her twenties who’d had colorectal cancer is frightened about a node on her lung. Booth assures her it’s just something to watch. An elderly man’s colon cancer has come back. It’s potentially curable, but the new tumour is in such a difficult place that removing it will require massive, risky surgery. It will be best to shrink the tumour first with chemotherapy. Another gentleman with relapsed metastatic colon cancer is here with his wife. They understand his disease is not curable, but they’re concerned the headaches he’s experiencing might mean it is escalating. They want to travel. A seventy-one-year-old woman, otherwise healthy, has pancreatic cancer. Booth must give her the disappointing news that she isn’t eligible for a clinical trial where she could have chemotherapy ahead of surgery. Her liver tests indicate it would be dangerous. Without diminishing the gravity of her situation, he offers reasons to be positive and promises that she will get the drug after the surgery.
