My Story: A Doctor Becomes a Cancer Patient
“I am grateful for all the compassionate care I got at Mount Sinai,” says Shari Brasner, MD, who has been an obstetrician/gynecologist at Mount Sinai for more than three decades. She was diagnosed with a rare gynecological cancer, but her cancer is in remission and her life has returned to normal. Now she helps other cancer survivors through the Woman to Woman program.
Shari Brasner, MD, has been an obstetrician/gynecologist at Mount Sinai for more than three decades. She has always put her patients first, no matter what it took. But in the fall of 2020, she became a patient.
Unexpectedly, she was diagnosed with a rare gynecologic cancer, and even as she continued as much as possible to care for her patients, she turned to her colleagues at Mount Sinai for lifesaving care. It wasn’t easy. She wore a wig to cover her balding head, long sleeves to hide injection bruising, and she coped with feeling awkward about being on the receiving end of care.
In this first-person account, she describes her experiences as both doctor and patient and how, thanks to surgery and chemotherapy, her cancer is in remission and her life has returned to normal.
She’s grateful for the compassionate care she received at The Mount Sinai Hospital and has become involved with Woman to Woman, an organization at Mount Sinai that pairs gynecologic cancer survivors with patients undergoing treatment, so she can help others who are experiencing what she went through.
It was a shock to learn I had a rare gynecologic cancer. We were in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, in the fall of 2020, so life was already turned upside down. But then my life became even more upside down.
At first, I thought I had an ovarian cyst. I’d been having abdominal pain and since I’d had ovarian cysts removed in the past, I thought this might be another cyst. An ultrasound suggested that might be the case and my doctor recommended having the cyst and ovary removed. Since I didn’t need to rush, I scheduled the procedure for a convenient time in mid-October.
At the beginning of October, I went Boston to spend a weekend with my son, Zachary. While I was there, I developed acute abdominal pain, and it became very clear that we were going to have to move up my surgery date. I asked my husband Jeff to drive me back to New York.
At this point, I’d worked at The Mount Sinai Hospital for more than 25 years. While we were driving down, I called all my patients with appointments for Monday and Tuesday and asked them to reschedule for later in the week. Then I called my surgeon, and I said, “I’m in acute pain. I think we need to do the surgery today.” Fortunately, he was available.
My husband dropped me off at the entrance of the Mount Sinai Emergency Department. He couldn’t come in because of the COVID-19 precautions. An ultrasound in the ED showed that I was bleeding into my abdomen, and they quickly took me to the operating room. The planned surgery was laparoscopy, a minimally invasive procedure, to remove the ovary with the cyst. But they found so much blood in my belly that they converted to an open procedure.
When they opened me up, they saw that there was a mass at the edge of my uterus, next to the ovary. The surgeon removed the ovary and mass and, because I was already postmenopausal, he also removed the uterus. There was no sign of cancer, but they sent the tissue to the lab for routine testing as always. I went home two days later.
A few days after I got home, my surgeon called, saying the pathology report showed I had a rare gynecologic cancer called choriocarcinoma. This disease is most associated with a recent pregnancy. I had not been pregnant in years; my twins were 24 years old. Choriocarcinoma’s tumor marker is the pregnancy hormone (human chorionic gonadotropin or hCG) and my tumor marker was off the charts. It was a bizarre diagnosis.
“I think it can be helpful and hopeful to women in the midst of treatment to interact with someone who’s on the other side of it, who can confidently say, “My life is not any different today than it was before all this happened.” It’s a nice way to pay it forward and do something with all my gratitude.”
The next step was look for any spreading, or metastasis. I called a radiology colleague; everybody bent over backwards for me, doing the testing the day I called. They did a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of my head and computed tomography (CT) scan of my abdomen and pelvis. I had several lesions in my lungs, including some blood clots. I started taking blood thinners to treat the clots.
One week later, at the end of October, I started chemotherapy. The first few chemo sessions were inpatient. But after a few months, when my hCG level wasn’t falling as quickly as hoped, my doctor changed some of the drugs. I then had outpatient chemo for several months, until early April.
When I look back, the pandemic was a very convenient time to have cancer. I am a private person and tried to be discreet with the patients and staff. Because of COVID-19, there were almost no on-campus meetings, and all our grand rounds were virtual. I was able to complete my treatment without the scrutiny of my peers. I felt fortunate that I was back at work, in a job that required me to be out of the house and engaging with people.
I also didn’t want my patients to think I was in any way frail or compromised, that I couldn’t take care of them. So I always wore a wig or two scrub hats to conceal my bald head. I was also self-conscious about my arms. The daily blood thinner shots made me bruise easily and every blood draw was obvious in my arms. I took to wearing long sleeve shirts under the scrubs to hide my arms. Masks helped too. When patients would say, “You look different,” I would tell them, “You do too, because of the mask.”
My doctors checked my hCG level regularly, and we watched it fall. When it got to zero, I did one or two more cycles of chemo to make sure it stayed there. My daughter Samantha called me her Zero Hero, and threw me a party to celebrate in June 2021.
I think for most doctors, being a patient in the hospital where you work is awkward. The nurses had to be respectful of my privacy while also taking care of me. They were wonderful. But I bet it was more awkward for them than for me.
After the initial post op visit, follow-up care was just blood work to monitor the hCG level. Sometimes, I had the blood drawn in my office and let my doctors know that it was still at zero. When my health care providers left Mount Sinai, I didn’t transfer my care to anyone else. I just do a blood test every few months to check that the marker remains at zero.
I am grateful for all the compassionate care I got at Mount Sinai. Now I am involved with Woman to Woman, an organization that pairs gynecologic cancer survivors with patients who are in treatment for gynecologic cancer. I think it can be helpful and hopeful to women in the midst of treatment to interact with someone who’s on the other side of it, who can confidently say, “My life is not any different today than it was before all this happened.” It’s a nice way to pay it forward and do something with all my gratitude.
