BEING DESIGNATED A PlONEER IN PALLIATIVE CARE is a wonderful surprise. It is a privilege to join this group, but beyond that, an invitation from the community to tell your story is a great gift. I hope what follows is helpful.Disillusionment and Discovery My palliative care wake-up call came in 1976, at the beginning of my third year at Stanford Medical School. I had high aspirations for an academic career, possibly in cardiology. For my first clerkship I picked internal medicine.One of my first patients, Mr. M., had mycosis fungoides, an ugly form of lymphoma that was rare then, although acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) would make it distressingly common in the 1980s. Fighting end-stage disease, this gentleman had flown a thousand miles for a clinical trial of adriamycin, now a mainstay of cancer treatment.
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