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Dr. David and Ariel Siegel
Dr. David Siegel (DS) I don’t think I would’ve ever imagined in your childhood that you would grow up and want to be a physician. I mean, I’m a physician, your mom’s a scientist, and I always wanted to understand what it was that made you take this path. I’ve never thought it was us.
Ariel Siegel (AS) I think that it’s a bunch of things. I think that part of it is genetic. I think we have similar interests, that you always like sciences, I always like sciences. I wasn’t big into poetry or writing, like my sister. When I was in high school, as you know, I had two surgeries on my neck and you saw how much of a difference these physicians and the nurses and the entire care team made in my life and in our family’s lives. And I see how you do it every day. And even how mommy does it, even though it’s on the other side of things by doing work in a lab. That obviously translates to clinical care eventually. So I think I wanted to take a role to try and help people get through these hard times.
DS: Yeah.
AS: As a medical student trying to figure out what I want to do in the future, how do you deal with death every single day? That’s a question I think a lot of my classmates have. How do you deal with the bad things in medicine, especially in oncology?
DS: I’ve told you this story as part of talking to you about what it means to be a physician. A young woman who I took care of when I was a medical student… [chokes up] Sorry, it’s a hard thing to talk about sometimes. But I got to share with her the end of her life and how brave she was and sort of how much she valued my presence. But it was such a powerful experience and to some extent now I get to take care of an illness that, unfortunately, virtually everybody dies from that illness. So it’s a constant stream of failures at some level, but I get to share with people an intensity of relationship that almost no one else does. I have a closer relationship with some of my patients than they have with their families, than they have with their children, than they have with their spouse, than they have with their dog, but they don’t believe that you’re going to fail. I think you get addicted to that serial intimacy that grows out of this kind of profession and I hope that’s something that you get out of the profession. I can’t think of anybody who would be more equipped to be the good doctor. Your patients are going to love you.
AS: I hope so.
DS: That idea that you can be transformative in somebody’s life at a personal level, but then to offer them the hope that they’re going to live longer than you thought that they were, let alone what they thought that they were going to do. There is nothing more rewarding than that. I take that back. This conversation with you was more rewarding.
