By Jenny Song
Service With a Smile
Bladder cancer survivor Elizabeth Cropper finds similarities between effective ushering and a good bedside manner
By Jenny Song
“I think some doctors get used to what they do because this is what they do all day long and they lose that personal touch,” says Artis. “But this is not what this patient does every day.”
Seeking a third opinion, she and her mother went to Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. Cropper gets emotional while talking about the physicians and nurses at the cancer center. “God bless everyone that’s in there,” she says, holding back tears as her voice quivers. “From the time you hit that door until you get examined,” she says, gently pounding the dining room table where she’s seated, “everybody has an atmosphere of comfort. They feel you.”
It’s not just that the staff would smile at her when they walked into a room. 
More important, she says, no one talked down to her as if she were a child. When Cropper’s urologic oncologist, David Chen, suggested that she undergo chemotherapy and then have surgery to remove her bladder, he followed up by asking her a simple question: How do you feel about it? “He knew I needed [to do] it,” she says, “but the way he said it and that he asked, ‘How do you feel about it?’—it was like, we’re in this together.”
“I think certainly for the treatment of cancer, it’s as important to a lot of patients not only what happens to them, but how things are explained to them,” says Chen. “And how good news and bad news is delivered.”
Not every patient’s cancer is curable, he says, “but there are always things—and I use that term loosely—that can be done to improve the situation,” such as raising a patient’s energy level or treating pain to improve the person’s quality of life.
In Cropper’s case, biopsies found that bladder cancer cells had spread to some of her lymph nodes. Because follow-up CT scans indicated that the lymph nodes were not growing, and Cropper’s quality of life hasn’t been compromised, doctors plan to monitor her progress with bimonthly scans.