Susan Desmond-Hellmann
speaker
362 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Susan Desmond-Hellmann’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I triaged. I triaged in San Francisco. If you didn't need chemotherapy, but you had Kaposi's sarcoma, I didn't see you.
The simple one was vincristine. Vincristine is actually reasonably good against KS. I used it in Uganda a lot. It does cause some neuropathy, but if you're careful about how much, and then bleomycin. Again, you have to be careful because of the pulmonary toxicity. Good old-fashioned vincristine and bleo, and then Texel. Texel was approved for Kaposi's sarcoma after I left Uganda.
It wasn't a drug before then. I would see the patient and I would literally ask them and their family, can you walk? If you can walk.
You're too healthy. We'll delay. There was triage because I only had on the shelf a certain amount of chemotherapy.
I have this philosophy, which I don't recommend it for others. It's just my philosophy. I love people. I love interacting with people. I love getting to know the patients who I care for. And it makes me happy to think I'm helping. Helping might be helping them get better. Helping might be helping with their pain or they can talk about dying with me because it doesn't make me scared.
So I get a lot of joy in trying to contribute, even if I feel overwhelmed and if I step back and think, how can we cope with this? My coping is... Is leaning in. Yeah.
Well, first of all, my husband is more introverted and probably gets more sad, but we are also a good team because we are there for each other. And I think it's a special thing done in small amounts, not too much to be able to come home and say, boy, that was tough. Here's what I dealt with today, or I need to tell this story, or I want to talk about this.
The other thing we did, which is I think so important is I do drive a lot of joy in trying to help, but I'm not a martyr. I don't believe in it. Okay, you worked hard, I worked harder. You suffered, I suffered more. I hate that. So we went to Greece. We still laugh about going to Greece and eating our way through Greece for a week. When we were in Uganda, we had a couple of other good trips.
We went on a hilarious safari to a place that was Moya Lodge that had been closed to all tourists had just reopened. And it was so great. We saw hippos and elephants. And we realized we were the only what you call in Uganda, Amazungu, which is a white person there. So it was a grand adventure. So we had some grand adventures and played tennis, enjoyed friends.
We did as much to keep our spirits up as one can.
Well, we wanted to go back to UCSF, but we had not kept our academic careers going as much as we should have. We didn't publish enough and they didn't have a global health program or money for us.
It actually wasn't. So we said, well, gee, when the chief of medicine outlined for us the plan for us to stay, a large part of it was taking care of patients to pay our way. So we said, boy, taking care of patients, we know what that looks like. So we went into private practice.
No, we moved back to Kentucky where Nick is from.
So we moved back to Kentucky and I was in a two-person oncology practice with a former classmate of Nick's in Lexington.
I was doing good old fashioned American oncology. I didn't take my oncology boards when we went to Uganda because I was in Uganda. So I still sort of laugh about taking the DaVita oncology book with a yellow Sharpie. I reread the big oncology book twice.
Yeah, it's brown these days, I think. I reread it twice, took my boards and did fine. So I was ready.
It was so, so, so, so different. And Nick was in a practice where he was more like a hospitalist. Somebody would get a fever in the ICU and they'd call that ID group. And my practice was a two-person practice. It was very classy. I saw a lot of lung cancer. It was Kentucky. So there's a lot of smoking, a lot of people from Appalachian. I actually like taking care of patients.
So that part I like, but I really missed intellectual research, collegial stuff that I was used to at UCSF because we had been there nine years by that time because we were still UCSF faculty when we were in Uganda. Nick was called about Bristol-Myers Squibb search for an expert on HIV because they were trying to follow AZT with the next antiretroviral.
I think it was DDI and D4T were both in development then. And so they recruited Nick to come and work at Bristol-Myers Squibb out of private practice. And Nick said, I won't come unless you have a job for my wife. And they said, no, we have a nepotism clause. We don't allow couples to work at Bristol-Myers Squibb. So he said, fine, I won't come. He's a good husband.
This is one of our favorite stories because it's a true story. So they called him back and they said, we really, really want you to come because we want this program to do well. And could your wife be a consultant? Would she agree to be a consultant and not a full-time employee? And he said, yeah, that'll work. So we moved to Connecticut. He had a job and I was the trailing spouse.
Showing 61–80 of 362 · page 4 of 19
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