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Don S. Dizon, MD, FACP, FASCO
Don S. Dizon, MD, FACP, FASCO, is a professor of medicine and professor of surgery at Brown University, director of the Pelvic Malignancies Program and Hematology-Oncology Outpatient Clinics at Lifespan Cancer Institute, and director of Medical Oncology and the Sexual Health First Responders Clinic at Rhode Island Hospital. He also serves as the head of community outreach and engagement of the Legorreta Cancer Center at Brown University. Dr. Dizon has served as past chair of ASCO's Social Media Working Group and the Cancer Communications Committee. In addition to his regular column on ASCOconnection.org, which has been honored with APEX awards in 2013 and 2014, he is a blogger for The Oncologist and a section editor of Gynecologic Oncology at UpToDate. Dr. Dizon is a member of the JCO Oncology Practice Editorial Board, and editor in chief of the ASCO Educational Book. Follow Dr. Dizon across social media channels @drdonsdizon.
Oct 05, 2015
One afternoon, I was seated in front of my computer working when a ping came through, notifying me of a message delivered on Twitter. I stopped what I was doing and scrolled through Twitter and then checked my message. It was from someone I had never met in real life (“IRL,” in social media),...
Sep 29, 2015
When I became an attending at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSKCC), I inherited a panel of patients from one of our doctors who had recently retired. One of them was Alice*, a spritely 70 year-old female. She had been diagnosed with stage III ovarian cancer in her fifties. She had surgery for it...
Sep 09, 2015
Jodi* had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer several years earlier, had received adjuvant carboplatin and paclitaxel therapy, relapsed three years later, and since then, had been on several forms of therapy—most recently receiving weekly paclitaxel. She was tolerating treatment well, but a CT scan...
Aug 31, 2015
She had come to see me as a second opinion; diagnosed with uterine serous cancer, one of the more aggressive types of uterine cancers. At surgery they found that it had metastasized to her nodes—stage III disease.
Aug 13, 2015
By Don S. Dizon, MD, FACP, and Elaine M. Doroff
Significant psychological distress often accompanies the first diagnosis of cancer, but for most patients, I find the distress fades as the cancer gets treated and ultimately becomes a part of their past. Life resumes a new normalcy, interrupted only...
Jul 27, 2015
I had taken care of her for many years; recommended the adjuvant treatment for her triple-negative breast cancer, then later—walking her through treatment when we found it had recurred in her liver. We had hoped for a long-lasting remission, but then she developed bone and lung metastases.
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