Patients and families often form close bonds with the people who care for them during tough times. Physicians and nurses become friends and family over the course of treatment, sharing in both the challenges and personal triumphs that accompany a cancer diagnosis. Those relationships continue.
Today, former patients and their families are working together with physicians and scientists to offer hope to future cancer patients through new research. Together, they are thoughtfully planning every detail of new facilities designed to make the cancer journey easier with environments designed to heal body and soul.
Meet some of the families who are reaching out to others at Providence Cancer Center.
Fit to fight
At 48 years old, Bill Gray was in the kind of physical
shape that most men 15 years younger would envy. He was
a biker, a skier, a runner – an all-around athlete. But for several
months in 2002 he’d been bothered by fatigue and experienced an
abrupt onset of abdominal pain. A visit to his doctor, David Silver,
M.D., at Providence Milwaukie Hospital revealed that he had advanced
kidney cancer.
"We just felt that if we saw it, it would devastate us, and maybe we would lose some of that willingness to fight," Ann Gray remembers. "For us, the right decision was to say, ‘Yes, we have it, but we're going to pick the best doctors we can find and figure out what we can do about this.'"