The Power of Will
They sat in a windowless hospital meeting room around a small round table, empty but for a box of tissues: Giselle Sholler, a new doctor just a few months into an oncology fellowship, and two young boys.
The boys were the older brothers of Sholler’s first cancer patient, a 5-year-old named Tyler, who was battling a vicious childhood cancer called neuroblastoma. The disease had gone into remission, but now it was back. And when children with neuroblastoma relapsed, they died. All of them.
The brothers, ages 9 and 13, had asked to speak to her, but at first they could only cry.
Why can’t you cure Tyler? Why aren’t there any other medicines?
Sholler swallowed hard to hold back the unsteadiness coming to her voice and gave the only response there was to give, that there was no cure for what their brother had.
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