“Now I am crying because you are sitting there.”

“I am sorry,” I say, preparing to jump up.

“No, please stay!”

This is our first meeting. “There” is by her feet, tucked to one side of her hospital bed to make room for me. She has been interrogated and prodded by all types of doctors. “The moment I saw her, I knew she needed you,” the last of her specialists told me.

Oncologists like me aren’t flattered by such statements: when called to see a patient at the tail end of an admission, it’s to deliver the worst kind of bad news. Or more accurately, to collect the fragments of bad news into a cogent explanation and confirm what everyone has hinted at: the illness is serious and the prognosis grave.

She is a wife, mother and the kind of amicable person one could readily imagine delivering just-baked cookies to a friend or offering to mind a neighbour’s baby.

After weeks of investigations for recurrent cancer, she is despondent.

One surgeon places her on the operating list. A second, junior surgeon isn’t convinced but holds his tongue. A third surgeon, who was scheduled to perform the operation, cancels it and I see why: while surgery is technically feasible, the most predictable outcome would be to prolong hospitalisation at the risk of wasting what precious time remains of her life.

She has a clear-eyed understanding of her........

© The Guardian