It is a place with calluses in strange places, a peculiarly narrow view of human experience, and idiosyncratic word usage. I work for the Blood and Bone Marrow Transplant Program at the University of Minnesota. Fairview Hospitals bought me, just as if I were chattel, along with the rest of the University Hospital, and I now work for Fairview University Medical Center. The patients who are eligible for a bone marrow transplant are terminal. Bone marrow transplant is no one s first choice of therapy.
Oncology is a weird specialty, requiring an odd mix of compassion and callousness.
We are also a research institution, which causes an even greater disconnect between people s real lives and how the nurses and doctors think about these same people. The most important thing about a patient in my office is their diagnosis. All of this leads to conversations with eerie tones. If only it were the Acute Myelogenous Leukemia that would not make it to transplant, rather than the thirty-six year old woman who has already undergone one bone marrow transplant but has relapsed more than a year later. The weirdest, though, are the breast cancers.