Cancer doctor says he’s ‘lucky’ because he sees people at their best
By Lee Roop of the Huntsville Times
Mike Mercier / The Huntsville TimesDr. Marshall Schreeder
HUNTSVILLE, AL — He spends his days helping people fight a disease whose name — cancer — may be the scariest word in the English language, but oncologist Dr. Marshall Schreeder is one of Huntsville’s biggest optimists.
Optimism is almost a job requirement, Schreeder said recently, but it’s more than that. It’s the natural result of what he sees every day.
“I’m astounded by the soul of man,” Schreeder said.
The soul of man?
Perhaps an unexpected observation from a man of science who first wanted to be a systems engineer, then ended up Huntsville’s best-known breast cancer doctor.
Schreeder, 63, discussed his life path late last month at Clearview Cancer Institute, the state of the art cancer clinic he, Dr. Jeremy Hon, and several other oncologists opened in 2006.
Hon and Schreeder have practiced together since the early 1980s at Clearview’s predecessor, the Comprehensive Cancer Institute.
The soul isn’t what Schreeder was looking for when he entered Tulane University medical school. But it’s close.
“I liked engineering, but I liked working with people a good bit more,” Schreeder said. “I thought that, maybe, I could do both by doing medicine.”
Why cancer?
“I picked oncology because I thought it had a long way to go,” Schreeder said, “and I thought I might be able to play a role in that development in my lifetime.”
The first decade “was pretty slow-going,” Schreeder conceded, but things have accelerated rapidly. He ticked off major developments in the field:
- Improvements in chemotherapy making intense nausea almost a thing of the past.
- Earlier detection at a time when a “cure” is a realistic expectation.
- An increase in active cancer-fighting drugs from four or five when Schreeder started to “a hundred or more” today.
- The development of targeted drugs, or “the concept that you can identify the critical target in a disease, hit nothing but that and have an excellent result.”
Even now, after a career that began in Phoenix in the 1970s, Schreeder still leans forward in excitement when he talks about the future.
“This last 10 years has really been a watershed,” he said, “and there’s a lot of excitement in the years to come.”
He plans to be a part of it. He knows where he wants oncology to go. That’s the big picture.
But how does an oncologist handle the daily disappointments, the inevitable death?
For Schreeder, it starts with his sense of the physician’s role.
“Oftentimes, I see myself as an educator,” Schreeder said, “and then let (the patients) tell me what they want to do.”
“We can’t guarantee the result,” he said. “All I can do is guarantee that, patient by patient, we’ll do the best we can.”
Rather than annoyed, Schreeder is fine when patients come armed with information about their malignancy gleaned from the Web.
“That’s what we want,” Schreeder said, “People to be informed, people to look at the options.
“When everything is said and done, peace of mind is part of the outcome. I think that’s very important to satisfaction.”
There are bad days, no doubt.
“Sometimes, it’s overwhelming,” Schreeder said. “And sometimes you have periods that you are humbled by how helpless you really are.
“On the other hand, it’s almost as if, those people you help, they make it all worthwhile,” he said, “even if they have an extra six months, or an extra year, an extra two years, an extra two decades.”
Cancer patients have “a greater appreciation for life,” Schreeder said, and they teach him every day.
“I get to know people at their very best,” he said, “and at a level that you don’t know in a different way … in a sense where everything is stripped off.”
The people. They get Schreeder up at 4 a.m. — still — for a half-hour’s hard bicycle ride on dark streets before breakfast. They fuel the morning hospital rounds, patient appointments at Clearview, administrative duties and research.
Two of his sons chose medicine as a career, Schreeder said, “and I did not encourage them at all. I said, ‘You see what I do. You see what the cost is. You’d better be sure this is really what you’d like to do, because you’re not going to be doing a whole lot else.”
“Maybe I’ve made it more than it needs to be,” he admitted, “I think I’ll just say I am what I am. As Popeye would say.”
And what is he?
“I’m lucky,” Schreeder said. “I’m lucky to be associated with the type of people I meet. You’d just be astounded at how wonderful people are and how brave they are and how every day it’s like that.”
