As the
head usher
at Ezekiel
Baptist
Church in
Southwest
Philadelphia,
Elizabeth
Cropper (in
red jacket)
cares for
the needs of
congregants
each week.
doctors removed the tumor from
her bladder, a biopsy revealed
that the cancer had invaded
the bladder’s lining. One of
the hospital physicians told
Cropper she’d need to have her
bladder removed, and then begin
chemotherapy. But his bedside
manner rubbed her and her
daughter the wrong way.
“I think some doctors get used
to what they do because this is
what they do all day long and they
lose that personal touch,” says
Artis. “But this is not what this
patient does every day.”
Seeking a third opinion, she and
her mother went to Fox Chase
Cancer Center in Philadelphia.
Cropper gets emotional while
talking about the physicians and
nurses at the cancer center. “God
bless everyone that’s in there,” she
says, holding back tears as her voice
quivers. “From the time you hit that
door until you get examined,” she
says, gently pounding the dining
room table where she’s seated,
“everybody has an atmosphere of
comfort. They feel you.”
It’s not just that the staff would
smile at her when they walked into
a room. More important, she says,
no one talked down to her as if
she were a child. When Cropper’s
urologic oncologist, David Chen,
suggested that she undergo
chemotherapy and then have
surgery to remove her bladder, he
followed up by asking her a simple
question: How do you feel about
it? “He knew I needed [to do] it,”
she says, “but the way he said it
and that he asked, ‘How do you
feel about it?’—it was like, we’re in
this together.”
“I think certainly for the treatment of cancer, it’s as important
