Most of the time, we teach and write about health issues from a distance. We don’t deal with matters like access to health care and enrolling in clinical trials ourselves. But every so often, a personal event disrupts this situation. We find ourselves facing the very issues we are used to considering from a comfortable, professional point of view.
This happened to me and six of my medical ethics colleagues, Dan Brock, Norman Fost, Arthur Frank, Leon Kass, Patty Marshall, and John Robertson. After many years of writing and teaching about serious illness and ethics, serious illness and ethics became something personal. Five of us were diagnosed with life-threatening cancers and three had spouses in that situation (one of us faced both situations).