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As a neurologist for the last 40 years, illness is the landscape in which I work. There is a certain confidence of familiarity that comes from knowing all too well the field one works in. Walking into rooms where patients are worried about the unknown, helping them interpret symptoms, translating complicated test results, and offering a treatment plan.
Then three years ago, I became the patient.
A cancer diagnosis changed the meaning of almost everything I thought I knew about medicine. Words I used thousands of times—biopsy, malignant, staging, prognosis, chemotherapy, recurrence—suddenly had an entirely different meaning and a weight was added to the words. The vocabulary had not changed, my perspective had.
My medical knowledge was reassuring in the beginning. There were benign explanations for my symptoms. Statistics favored one possibility over another. Additional testing would clarify the situation.
But physicians also know too much. In January 2023, I stared at a scan I just had. At that moment, I saw my own diagnosis.
Cancer. I had cancer.
I had delivered that difficult news to countless patients and now I sat on the other side of the conversation. Perhaps the most striking realization was how little of the doctor’s discussion I actually heard. The oncologist explained pathology, staging, molecular markers, treatment options, and survival statistics. Yet my mind repeatedly returned to a basic question:
“Am I going to die?”
In that moment, my professional identity offered surprisingly little comfort. I became the patient with an identification bracelet, waiting for blood to be drawn and a scan to take place, while watching medication drip through intravenous tubing.
Perhaps, the most difficult thing was surrendering control. Physicians are accustomed to making decisions, but cancer requires entrusting those decisions to be made by others. Treatment also revealed how differently illness is experienced as a patient on the other side of the white coat. My symptoms became lived experiences that impacted sleep, relationships, work, and my perception of the future.
Cancer also changed my meaning of time.
Before diagnosis, the future was assumed. Life now became divided into intervals:
until the next treatment, the next scan, the next appointment. Even good news was complicated. A scan showing no evidence of disease brought enormous relief. Still, it could not restore the innocence that existed before my diagnosis. The possibility of recurrence remains quietly present. Survivorship is therefore not simply a return to normal. It is learning to live normally while accepting that certainty may never completely return.
Yet something important emerged from this experience.
I had always prided myself on being a compassionate listener, yet now I no longer see the patient who asks the same question three times as inattentive; perhaps fear prevented the answer from being heard the first two times. The patient who wants to discuss a statistically unlikely complication no longer seems irrational.
Most importantly, cancer has retaught me the age-old dictum that medicine has two equally important dimensions:
There is the science of medicine—the pathology, imaging, molecular biology, clinical trials, and therapeutics that make survival possible.
And there’s the human experience of medicine—the fear, uncertainty, dignity, hope, and trust that accompany illness.
As a physician who became a cancer patient, I occupied both worlds. Three years after CAR-T therapy, to everyone else I may appear unchanged, but appearances are deceiving. I now understand that crossing from one side of the examination room to the other requires only a diagnosis. I understand that expertise does not eliminate vulnerability, and that knowledge cannot completely conquer fear. I have learned that patients do not experience diseases; they experience disrupted lives. While cancer tried to take things from me, it also gave me something unexpected: the privilege of now understanding medicine from both sides.
For me, that has permanently changed my view on what it means to be a doctor.
Written by Dr. Carlo Tornatore/MedStar Georgetown University Hospital
To learn more about Dr. Tornatore’s CAR T journey, watch the video above.