Richard T. Penson, MD, MRCP, of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center, is rarely bored. When he isn’t seeing patients as Clinical Director of Medical Gynecologic Oncology at MGH or working with a new service for patients with cancer on the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, he can be found leading children’s lessons at Living Hope Foursquare Church or managing a large menagerie of pets in his home in Boston.

AC: How many pets do you currently have?
Dr. Penson: Sixty-five. As parents, my wife and I engage with whatever the kids are passionate about, and our oldest really wanted to be a vet. When our son said, “I want an animal,” we got a hamster, and when he said, “I want snake and I want a lizard,” we went with the flow. It got seriously out of hand—at one point we had 150 pets living in a suburban Boston five-bedroom colonial. We have a converted basement with a pond for an alligator and pens for huge tortoises. We have a room with a rare opossum from South America we got through the San Diego Zoo, flying squirrels, and sugar gliders. Our son is now 22 and studying environmental science, so we’ve weaned down on the animals to 65. In Massachusetts, you have to have licenses for some exotic pets, which we take very seriously, so we have one for alligators, one for snakes, and one for chameleons. The other animals we have don’t require special licenses.

AC: Is their care a family project?
Dr. Penson: A key lesson for us as busy parents was to maximize the return on everything and to do as much as possible with the kids. We believe in “see one, do one, teach one” at work and at home. So we set up “Extreme Animals” and do shows for local schools and parties. It pays for the heating and the food and things for the animals. The kids do the planning, graphic design, basic business skills—they run it with my wife’s input.

One of the things that we’ve all learned is that “owning” something that’s maybe a little weird or shameful is a good lesson for us all. It’s really easy, when someone asks if we have any animals, to just say, “Yes, we have a lovely Cavalier King Charles spaniel,” but we have to own our dark side as well. The animals have matured us in accepting our own warts and wrinkles.

AC: Of the animals you have now, do you have a favorite?

Dr. Penson:Most of us would say that our favorite is a lizard called Sky, a South American tegu. He’s quite blue, with pretty handbag skin, four feet long, and as friendly as a dog. The rest are pretty cold-blooded; they’re curious sometimes, but they aren’t pets.

AC: Have you ever had a scare where you thought an animal had escaped?
Dr. Penson: Sky escaped when we were on vacation. We have really good cages and haven’t had any problems with those, but Sky is so friendly that we let him roam around the house. My mother-in-law was looking after the animals while we were gone, and she couldn’t find him anywhere. When we returned, she confessed, “I’m so sorry, I think I let Sky out and I lost him.” The kids said, “No, you didn’t,” and in about 15 minutes they’d looked in all his favorite places and found him curled up at the bottom of somebody’s bed, nice and warm, and not lost at all.

AC: You also volunteer as a children’s pastor—is that at all similar to owning 65 pets?
Dr. Penson: There probably are some parallels. People underestimate how frightening children are, and there are a bunch of either future leaders or future tyrants who can be pretty difficult to marshal. It’s hard to get 20 kids under age 10 at the front of the church to have an orderly lesson in 10 minutes and deliver a message. The reptiles are actually quite good training for that sort of thing.

At our church service we have a kids’ lesson in the middle, and I do an object lesson, usually a hands-on learning experience. We recently did a lesson with a cardboard tube shaped into a square at one end and a triangle at the other, where it’s a different shape but clearly the same perimeter, to illustrate being accepting of other people. Our church has been exploring gender orientation and acceptance, which can be hard to do in a parent-friendly way, but we’re trying to talk about how we’re all different.

AC: As part of an oncology service in Martha’s Vineyard, what is it like to work in a place that most people consider a vacation destination?
Dr. Penson: When I first came to MGH 15 years ago, there were 12 oncologists—we now have 100. We’re trying to recapture a “village” approach to cancer care—to provide world-class medical care, to lose none of the passion and excellence, but to not dismantle the local connection and personal touch.

In April, MGH started a new service in which we have six oncologists on the team who go to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard; I’m the Clinical Director of the cancer service on the islands. We also have a nurse practitioner working full-time there, two days a week in Nantucket and three in Martha’s Vineyard. The islands’ populations go from under 20,000 to over 100,000 in the summer. The program is expanding, and we’ve received many emails about getting local treatment from people who were going to be summer visitors.

At MGH, I usually only see patients with gynecologic cancers, with a few weeks of general oncology and general medicine, but doing general oncology in a community hospital setting is totally different and really quite exciting. Modern academic medicine doesn’t leave much space for adventure, and we’re finding it in the process of going out there. I bet we have a book in a few years’ time, with lots of interesting tales.