The Holiday Card: Processing the Unexpected Loss of a Patient

Listen to ASCO’s Journal of Clinical Oncology Art of Oncology article, "The Holiday Card” by Dr. Laura Vater, who is a gastrointestinal oncologist at Indiana University Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center. The article is followed by an interview with Vater and host Dr. Lidia Schapira. Dr Vater shares how she processed the unexpected loss of a patient and how a colleague unknowingly helped her cope.

TRANSCRIPT

Narrator: The Holiday Card, by Laura B. Vater, MD, MPH 

I kept her family holiday card tucked into the side pocket of my black briefcase for a year and 3 months after she died. I carried it back and forth to the office each day, never viewing it but with a deep awareness of its presence. It was a transitional object, my therapist said. I took it with me for reasons that were not logical or even fully clear to me—perhaps part of me thought if I kept it in that dark space, then maybe her death was not real, after all. Death is not new to me. Much of my work as a GI oncologist is palliating my patient’s symptoms and helping them navigate the end of life.

But she was not supposed to die. She was a vibrant, kind person, and I was treating her for a potentially curable condition. A team was assembled, a tumor board discussion was held, and a comprehensive plan was derived from published clinical trials and national guidelines. She was on track to finish chemotherapy and recover. She was meant to have decades more with her husband and teenage children. 

This is what gnawed at me—death out of place. It was during a nap on a normal day, months into her treatment course. There were no proceeding symptoms or perceptible changes. The autopsy showed no apparent cause of death.

Amid it all, her family was kind and expressed thanks. “She was grateful for your investment in her,” they said. “She felt cared for.” Rechanneling my distress, I rechecked the dose of every chemotherapy agent she received, along with each supportive medication. It was all per protocol, verified by pharmacy teams, and infused without adverse reactions. Yet, the questions remained. I continued to carry the weight of responsibility, along with the holiday card.

In clinic the next week, I met a patient with the same diagnosis. Again, there was a multidisciplinary discussion, and we planned to give him the same drug regimen. After reviewing the more common side effects with him, a lump formed in my throat. “In exceedingly rare cases,” I said, “cancer treatment may lead to death.” My eyes began to water, and I pushed back the tears to answer his remaining questions.

He completed the treatment and, over time, had no sign of recurrence. Many more patients followed with the same diagnosis and positive outcomes.

And the card remained in the bag. 

Over a year later, a senior mentor and I had a shared patient with two malignancies. We carefully discussed and managed her care, but she unfortunately had a rapid clinical decline and was admitted to the intensive care unit. Her family elected for comfort care, and she died soon after. We saw each other in the hallway the following week. “Just awful, wasn’t it?” he said.

I exhaled and nodded. 

Perhaps he could see the invisible burden I carried, and he sighed. “We do the best we can with the data we have, but we’re treating terrible diseases. Sometimes, bad things happen that we cannot predict or prevent. We did everything we could for her.”

Something deep inside me released in that moment. Often, mentors do not realize how healing their words can be—even brief ones shared in passing on a busy clinical day. Eventually, on a quiet afternoon at home, these words gave me the courage to reach into the side pocket of my work bag and remove the white envelope. My name was written and underlined in royal blue ink.

Slowly opening the card, I saw once again a snapshot of life: a beaming family with arms around each other amid a blanket of paradise-green trees. They were huddled so close that there was no space between them. I imagined how she might have felt at that moment, the warmth of her children pressing on either side and the joy spreading across her face. Perhaps someone had told a joke just moments before. My face crumpled, and I began to sob. How badly I wanted to cure her, to restore her to health, to see her year after year for follow-up, and hear about her children’s unfolding lives. And now, they were navigating the world without their mother.

One of the most challenging aspects of practicing oncology is the uncertainty of it all. Even when the variables are the same—diagnosis, staging, and treatment—the outcomes are unpredictable. We, of course, know and rationally accept this as physicians. It is the nature of our work to care for diverse and varied human beings. But even so, when devastation occurs unexpectedly and without apparent reason, the toll of grief can be crushing. 

It is often the support we receive from one another that helps us heal. We must remind our mentees that despite our greatest efforts in a field of extensive data, unpredictable outcomes still happen. We will have questions that may never have answers. Our minds may try to cope with this randomness in ways that are not always logical. Our grief may linger like an open wound for months or even years to come. Caring words shaped by time and experience can help us process, cope, and continue on.

I am not typically a person who holds onto holiday cards, but I have a tray in the bottom drawer of my home desk with about a dozen meaningful ones. This card now lives among them. I still often think about my patient and her family, and I even look at the card from time to time. However, it is no longer in that liminal space within the side compartment of my bag. It has become integrated into my life and remains part of me—her story forever interwoven with my own.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Hello, and welcome to JCO's Cancer Stories: The Art of Oncology, which features essays and personal reflections from authors exploring their experience in the oncology field. I'm your host, Dr. Lidia Schapira, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. Today we're joined by Dr. Laura Vater, a gastrointestinal oncologist at the Indiana University Simon Comprehensive Cancer center. In this episode, we'll be discussing her Art of Oncology article, “The Holiday Card.”  

Our guest disclosures will be linked in the transcript.  

Laura, welcome to our podcast, and thank you for joining us. 

Dr. Laura Vater: Hi, Lidia. Thank you so much for having me today.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: It's our pleasure. So let's start by just asking you a general question that I think our authors like to share with listeners. And that is, why do you write? When do you write?

When did you start writing?

Dr. Laura Vater: Yeah, so I started writing, actually, during my first few years of medical school as a way to process and cope through many of the challenges and the difficulties and the emotional ups and downs of training. When I was a third year medical student, I was pregnant, and I was rotating through the high risk maternal fetal medicine rotation, and I witnessed a stillborn child, and that child was about the same gestational age that I was pregnant at that time. And I thought about that family. Had they picked out a crib, and had they chosen the color of paint for their walls? And anticipating this life and having it end in this just grief. And participating in that ritual of loss really evoked a deep emotional chord in me that I remember walking out right after that shift was about 2:00 in the morning and it was freezing cold in February. As I was walking in the parking lot, I just started crying. And I thought, I need a way to process and cope with the challenges that I'm witnessing in my training that served me very well. I always journaled through medical school and residency as an internal medicine resident, as an oncology fellow, and now during my gastrointestinal oncology practice. And sometimes I go a week or two without journaling, sometimes I'm writing every day and it kind of depends on the week, but it is truly something that helps me process and cope. 

Dr. Lidia Schapira: So it's good to know that you are so comfortable with words and writing as a way of processing. But I'm curious to have you address the next layer, which is then to go back and turn it into a piece of art, turn it into a piece of writing that you want to share with others. Can you talk a little bit about that process and the role that's played in your professional development?

Dr. Laura Vater: For a long time, writing was something very informal in my life, and then I started really enjoying spending time writing, and so I started participating in different writing groups. I participate in a Gold Humanism Writing Group with Judith Hannan. I did the Fall Narrative Medicine Workshop at Columbia, part of the Pegasus Physician Writers at Stanford University, where we meet every month to go over our writing. We've created a Writing for Wellness program on campus. And so this went from something very informal then something that I really was drawn to and loved, and that, really working with my peers, participating in writing prompts, reading both fiction, medical related nonfiction, and narrative stories, that's really crafted my ability as a writer to turn something that's just a reflection into something more, into something that I hope will help others. I think we all feel that way, right? If we share something that is perhaps a bit vulnerable, sometimes shrouded in shame, that perhaps it might help another trainee or early career physician through what they're going through. 

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Well, maybe you're the best person that I can think of to answer this question, but tell me a little bit about how you see this narrative in oncology and narrative medicine applied to practice to training.

Dr. Laura Vater: I think that it's something that is necessary. It's something that helps me to pause, to slow down, to see the humanity in my patients, and also to hold on to my own humanity. And so it's truly something that allows me to continue to practice, and I hope to practice well through paying attention to the nuances of my patients and their stories. Sometimes, I'll be sitting in a room with a person, and I'll notice the color of their glasses, or I will be moved by something, a direct quote that they say. And I think that both reading narrative essays and writing helps me to slow down and to pay more attention. I think it helps, hopefully helps me to be a better clinician, but also allows me to have more meaning in what I do.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Yeah, perhaps even we can use the word ‘joy’. It's more interesting if you're curious and open and you see these things.

Can I ask you how you deal with the emotional labor and the emotional investment in your patients? You seem to be somebody who has no difficulty engaging at a very deep level. But how do you work that through and fit it into the rest of your life?

Dr. Laura Vater: You know, it's interesting that you asked me that question, because over the last two weeks, that has been the question in my mind that I've been coming back to. I've been covering for a partner that's been out of town and another partner on maternity leave. And so I found that my clinical work has been a bit busier and that I've hit that point in my early career where I know my patients very well. But as a gastrointestinal oncologist, many of my patients, I'm walking through devastating recurrences of what we thought was curable pancreatic cancer is now stage 4. So I've found that even over the last two weeks, I had a few days last week where I came home after the clinic and I had nothing left in the tank. I have my husband and my eight year old daughter, and I just had a few days last week where I actually asked myself, I said, “How am I going to continue to do this work, both clinically, physically, intellectually, and emotionally exhausting days, right?” Our clinics can be all of those. Our clinical work can be all of those. 

And so I actually took some time over the weekend. I've been intentional for a very long time about how can I connect with patients deeply to know them as human beings, help them to walk through really awful things, but then be able to have both health and wellbeing and joy in my own life. Because I think we deserve that. We deserve the health that we strive so hard to give to others. It's something that I'm still processing through. Things that help me cope? Of course, I regularly go to therapy. I think that really helps because I have a lot of patients who do pass from their cancers. And I also write. Writing is a tool that I come to, and sometimes it's even writing, “I'm emotionally exhausted today. And this and this, and this happened.” And sometimes it's being in nature, sometimes it's listening to music, sometimes it's just doing nothing. Reading a book I've read before or watching a show I've read before.  

But I keep coming back to this idea of, there's this thought of we all develop some emotional calluses. The things that evoke emotion in us when we are first learning medicine, when we're medical students, are not the same things that may evoke emotion in us as we progress through our careers. For me now, it's often a person that I have a deep connection with that I've known over time. And in that moment when something really devastating happens, I'm finding that that is probably the most emotionally difficult thing, especially if that person is particularly young or has young children. And so I'm increasingly trying to find ways to cope with that, because we need to do that to protect our longevity, to be able to do this work. 

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Yeah. And to stay fresh for our patients as well. I think that we are a culture that is immersed in grief, and we volunteered for this work. But I think we volunteered perhaps when we didn't quite understand all of the areas that this grief and the sorrow and this immersion into that culture can really deeply penetrate. It sounds like you have used all of the possible resources, and you're incredibly open and frank about it. I wonder if in your institution, people talk about it as frankly as you do.

Dr. Laura Vater: I have had mentors who have talked with me. I have the benefit of being trained through residency and fellowship at the same institution where I work. So I've known some of my mentors for almost 10 years, more than that. And so sometimes I will ask them, “How do you cope with this?” Some of my peers are incredibly funny and, not in a- sometimes sarcastic, yes, but not in a demeaning way towards patients, but they just bring a lightness to the clinic. Especially in the world of gastrointestinal oncology, where a mentor once told me that eight out of ten of my patients will not live long term. And so a lot of what I do is palliative care and end of life care. And I think we knew that. Like you said, we know what we sign up for. But sometimes the reality of that can be much, much different than that. 

I do reach out to my mentors. I try not to burden them. But sometimes if we're in a clinic and I notice that we have a down moment, I might say, “Wow, I'm dealing with this.” And they'll sometimes share an experience from their early career or even recent and I think that's healing. There is something about being vulnerable with your peers, whether that's through writing and formally publishing a story and reading a story of someone you've never met, or even in those moments in the clinic or in the hospital where you share something with your residency team or your colleague that can be very healing.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: And even being able to open yourself up and be vulnerable together, or cry with somebody, or cry reading somebody else's story. There are some essays that have been published in The Art of Oncology that make me cry every single time I read them. And it's a way of feeling that I'm sort of in solidarity with a colleague's pain, or that I feel sort of understood, or that I have a community of peers, people who are also drawn to these very tense, emotionally intense situations, but find meaning in it and find meaning and keep going back to it on a very intentional basis. And I think you're probably one of the club. 

So let's talk a little bit about your essay, this beautiful essay about this holiday card that you kept tucked in your briefcase until it was the right moment when you could process something that was deeply, deeply painful to you because it was a death that was out of place, that wasn't supposed to happen. Tell us a little bit about how this became a story for you.

Dr. Laura Vater: I still remember the moment that I woke up to an email from this patient's husband, unfolding that this patient had unexpectedly died the night before. And that was the first email that I read that morning. It was early, and I remember pacing in my office until it was late enough that I could call him. And, of course, then came all of the questions and all of the uncertainty and unfortunately, without answers ever being found. And just like before, when I was a medical student, I needed somewhere for this to go. I needed somewhere for this to go. And so this became even that day, journaling about this experience, in a way, of course, that protected my patient's identity. And as things unfolded over the next few months, I kind of came back to the same word document. And just anything that came into my mind as I was processing through this went there because I knew it needed a safe place to go. 

And then months later, this was something I talked about through therapy over many, many months, actually, and then eventually to this encounter I had with this mentor who provided very healing words in a moment when he had no idea that I was processing all of this about a different patient. And how that eventually led me to be able to pull the card from my bag and really grieve, really allow myself to grieve in that moment. You don't stop grieving, but it helps you to find a healthy way to process through something very difficult and be able to cope and continue on and hopefully share with others that these things we go through in medicine, we're not isolated in our experience. You're not alone in what you go through when something like this happens early in your career. These are normal things that you're going to think, and it may take months or even years to process through.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Yeah, I think the healing intention of your mentor's words or of a senior colleague or somebody just willing to sort of stand with you or be with you and share that is something that is so incredibly valuable. Maybe some of our listeners can think of moments where somebody has been there for them or where they have been there for somebody else.

Laura, I think that there's one or two books there hidden in your files. Maybe that's next. I mean, just the evolution of the process and the formation of your professional identity, your clinical persona, and the intention and attention you bring to the work. Is there a book in the making?

Dr. Laura Vater: Thank you, Lidia. That's very kind of you. I'm hopeful that at some point there may be a nonfiction book. I didn't share this with you yet, but I also write fiction. I've actually completed one novel, and I'm working on my second novel. Writing has become something that I never anticipated myself spending much of my time doing in my non clinical space, but much of what my fiction writing is really about the mental health of clinicians and well being, and also many of these challenges that we face. And so hopefully more to come in the next few years with those, yes.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Yeah. I look forward to another conversation and to reading more of your work. Laura, this has been a lovely conversation. Thank you.

Dr. Laura Vater: Thank you, Lidia.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: And to our listeners, until next time, thank you for listening to JCO's Cancer Stories: The Art of Oncology. Don't forget to give us a rating or review, and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can find all of the ASCO shows at asco.org/podcasts.

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Show Notes: 

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Guest Bio:

Dr. Laura Vater is a gastrointestinal oncologist at the Indiana University Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center.