I learned more about comprehensive cancer care when I became a patient in 1996 than I had during a residency in medicine or in practice as an internist and palliative care physician in a teaching hospital. When I was given a diagnosis of aggressive inflammatory carcinoma, I found myself transformed from one who orders and administers medication to a terrified recipient. Until then, I had felt that I was a particularly empathetic doctor who listened to and, I thought, heard the stories of my patients. It was a shock, then, to undergo the foreign and surreal experience of becoming a . . .