Blog

Stephanie Chuang: Honoring a legend in cancer care – Dr. Shekinah Elmore

Photo of Shekinah Elmore from gofundme.com

Jul 29, 2024, 01:37

Stephanie Chuang: Honoring a legend in cancer care – Dr. Shekinah Elmore

Stephanie Chuang, Founder of the Patient Story, shared a post on X:

“Honoring a legend in cancer care: Dr. Shekinah Elmore.

I did not know her. I just stumbled upon her TED MED talk shared by Fumiko Ladd Chino. An incredible and poignant speaker who was both a cancer patient (multiple times) and radiation oncologist. The voice we all need to hear.

‘As oncologists, we talk to our patients as if the worst thing that could happen is that their cancer could come back, or that it could spread, or that they could die from it. As a patient, I know that these are paramount. But I want to change the way that we think about this. And I want to change the way that we talk about this with our patients.

As a patient, the worst thing that can happen is that cancer robs you of opportunity, of the ability to be, and to do, and to love. And it will. At least, temporarily, it will.

But to minimize this loss of life in the living, that is the harder, and I would say, truer job of the oncologist: to take all the tools that we have and situate them in the context of a patient’s whole entire life. To be guides for how to sit with suffering, acknowledge it deeply, but to not let fear of future suffering be the narrative for the journey forward.’

Thank you for the work you did. We will continue to feel the impact of your words for so many years to come.

She leaves behind a beautiful young son and her husband. If you’d like – visit this GoFundMe page is to directly support her family.”

Source: Stephanie Chuang/X

Shekinah Elmore was an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, specializing in Radiation Oncology and Global Health, a position she held since June 2020. Prior to this, she was a Resident Physician in the Harvard Radiation Oncology Program from July 2016 to June 2020 and a Clinical Fellow at Harvard Medical School from 2010 to June 2020. She also served as an Intern in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.