Fourteen cancer drugs have been in shortage in recent months. Here's why.As a doctor, I know patients often dread getting an after-hours call from me, afraid that I have troubling information to impart. But I didn’t expect to be on the receiving end the night my sister, a physician herself, rang me up.I was in my first year out of residency practicing primary care in Georgia, devoting what little free time I had to preparing for my wedding and honeymoon four months from then.
I’d often wait eagerly for my mother to report back on her latest trip to the oncologist. And equally as often, she would be too overwhelmed and upset to summarize those visits, asking me to discuss it with my sister or call her doctor directly instead. These calls began to feel and sound like interrogations.
Eventually, I began to understand why it was so difficult for her to speak about her cancer. For decades, she had treated so many tumor-ridden patients herself, and intimately knew. And having worked in a hospital seeing the critically ill, she rarely saw patients who had promising outcomes after cancer – just the ones suffering from debilitating complications, treatment side effects or terminal stages of the disease.