Have you ever had a doctor break down and cry with you as you received bad news? Sometimes I have to work really hard not to be that doctor.

Each day in Oncology clinic, I see all the stages of grief. Everyone battles cancer completely differently, and I get to experience it all as one giant roller coaster.

One minute an old woman comes in after her last round of chemo left her hospitalized. She absolutely insists on taking another round. Her doctors hesitate to give her more chemo and radiation than she could tolerate, yet she refuses to go to the grave without having pulled out all the guns. The defiance in her eyes is contagious. I want to shout, “Yeah!! Go get ’em!”

Next thing we see a young man whose cancer had no business interrupting the course of a well-plotted life. He’s already nauseated just worrying over how the treatments will affect his family. He and his wife raise a slew of questions, exploring every crevice of every possibility. Our uncertainty makes them visibly uneasy: Curing cancer is a numbers game, from our perspective. But for each individual patient, we either achieve a cure or we do not—and the side effects are definitely not worth it for a not-cure. I wonder if he might talk himself out of getting any treatment at all.

Then we get a happily oblivious patient, a guy with brain tumors so far gone that he no longer has the capacity to understand his own plight. We try to explain that he needs to take his chemo pills diligently. He smiles pleasantly and agrees, indicating that he clearly won’t do anything of the sort. While this is truly terrifying to me, part of me also thinks that perhaps, for a cancer patient, he is in the best of all worlds.

The tearful patient really gets to me. Someone had given her false hopes about her prognosis, so then it became our job to set the record straight. The doctor apologizes profusely. The patient retreats into heaves and sobs as she begins to mourn her own death all over again. In her mind, we have just killed her. I hand her a box of tissues—inadequate for the gravity of the situation. Yet she smiles briefly as she takes the box from me. We continue the conversation as she empties the box. Pagers ring, and we silence them without answering. Occasionally I stare at the ceiling so the tears won’t crash down.

Where in my medical training was I supposed to learn how to let a patient die? How do I tell the dark news, and then, how do I react? Do I grieve the disease, or do I fight it? What does the patient need to hear? Is it inappropriate to laugh with them? To cry? Is it unprofessional to admit that the cancer, in beating the patient, is also beating the doctors?

What is a good doctor?