Dying Doctor a Living Lesson for Compassion : Medicine: Students are moved by personal experience. Cancer patient is convinced that spiritual strength influences physical health.

By MICHELLE BOORSTEIN

Jan. 22, 1995 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

BOSTON — For more than an hour, the teacher listened to her students trade stories of their first days working in the hospitals. She sat silent as they vowed passionately to be sensitive to their patients.

And then Dr. Lesley Heafitz spoke, her gravelly voice immediately drawing the class’s attention, including that of the student who had nodded off in the corner, a stethoscope still hanging around his neck.

“I have a story to tell you,” she began.

She was sick, they knew that. But now she wanted to tell them what a doctor had told her a few days earlier. And the way he told her.

He said if she was not dead by springtime, “I’d be too sick to enjoy it.”

“I’d consider that as an example of how not to handle that situation,” the 54-year-old cancer patient told her Harvard Medical School students.

In a course designed to encourage compassion in future doctors, Heafitz and her fight for life provide testimony that charts and statistics never could.

And while Heafitz, a graduate of the medical school herself, is one of several who teach the class, her particular lesson is not lost on her students.

“There are some things you just can’t read in a book,” said Paul Harriott, a former student of Heafitz. “She showed me that even if physicians think they can’t do much, they can talk about never losing hope, and there is significant merit to that.”

The class, called “Doctor-Patient,” is required for third-year medical students as they begin working in hospitals. The students exchange horror stories--like the ones about patients discharged quickly after major surgery because their insurance wouldn’t cover longer stays--and act out tough encounters, such as telling a patient she is dying.

“We wouldn’t have to grossly speculate (about) what does it mean to be facing your own mortality and to be in extreme pain, because Lesley was there,” said Jim McDonald, another student of Heafitz.

Heafitz, who has ovarian cancer, had been rocked by her battle with cancer long before the doctor so coldly gave her the death sentence.

Weakened by chemotherapy, she was told she could no longer see patients in her pediatrics practice. She spent months reconsidering what it meant to call herself a healer. Then, she decided she had things to teach.

So she left the comfort of working in seaside Newburyport and returned to her alma mater to tell students about what she found was largely missing from medicine.

“Doctors are controllers. I think a lot of us go into medicine hoping to control disease,” said Heafitz. “We as physicians don’t ask questions about the alternatives. We don’t say (to patients): ‘What else are you doing for this illness? Are you meditating? Are you trying holistic medicine?’ ”

Heafitz began to change her outlook after she was diagnosed with cancer in the summer of 1991.

She went one day to the home of a man she calls her “healer,” an acting teacher known for coaching people in relaxation techniques. He had her lie on a mat on the floor amid crystals and listen to soothing music. She remembers thinking: “What the hell am I doing with this kind of stuff?”

Heafitz comes from a traditional medical background. In addition to her Harvard education, her late father was director of one of the National Institutes of Health and her husband is a prestigious thoracic surgeon.

But sessions of “guided visualizations” with the healer produced not only what her doctor calls an “improved quality of life,” but also a series of poems, published this summer in a collection titled “In Darkness and in Light.”

“No matter what is done to me, I am in control,” Heafitz writes in the poem “Invincible.”

Heafitz’s conviction that spiritual strength influences physical health does not jibe with most approaches emphasized in medical school, leaving some students to snidely refer to her class as “sensitivity training.”

But most seem thankful for her perspective.

“The way you’ve been very up-front about your illness is immensely courageous,” Robert Gilardetti told her at the close of a recent class period. “It is a dramatic testimony to you as a teacher.”

Courses like the one Heafitz teaches are not uncommon at medical schools around the country. At the University of Southern California School of Medicine, students work with actors trained to be patients, or close relatives of terminally ill patients.

“We go over literally what words should come out of your mouth,” said Dr. Leslie Blackhall, assistant professor of medicine at USC. She said the “heal curriculum,” from which students must take courses every year, was started because “the public was clearly dissatisfied with the way doctors interact with them.”

Meanwhile, Heafitz fights against a cancer that continues to spread. Last summer, five of her six grown children quit jobs and returned from places as far as Moscow and New York City to the small beach house where they spent summers while growing up.

Having her children nearby added to her recent uplift of spirit.

“I had no idea what healing meant before this. I didn’t understand the power that the patient has,” Heafitz said.