Do you follow the recommendations you give to your patients? 

• Depends on which ones: No smoking? Literally yes.  Exercise more? One day …

• Usually yes, but I'm not rigid! The most important advice I give and stick to is daily physical activity.

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What do you think is the most difficult medical practice? The easiest ? 

• The most difficult: oncology or pediatric hemato-oncology OR doing what you don't like doing. The easiest: do what you love to do

• The most difficult = guard upstairs! The easiest = monitoring patients in the outpatient clinic. (I'm not sure I fully understand the question)

Would you be friends with your colleagues if you had met them outside of work? 

• Some yes!

• Yes for some, but no for the majority. I prefer friends outside of medicine to take my mind off things more.

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What do you think is the most important factor for a successful residency in your specialty?  A career in your specialty?

• Innate desire for the advancement of knowledge/treatments (think: participation in clinical trials) and a critical eye for novelties that evolve so quickly.  Develop the ability to stay at the forefront of science while keeping the patient's best interest in mind.  Also: know how to decompress and keep a sense of humor with your colleagues!

• For the residency, you have to be hardworking because the field of knowledge to be acquired is immense and constantly changing. For the career, it is necessary to like to question oneself permanently and to be in perpetual training, so much the knowledge evolves quickly.

What is the best advice you have received? 

• Recognize when an opportunity hits you and take advantage of it, even if it's not what you planned.

• Always keep calm no matter what! And also don't procrastinate.

What is the most common criticism you receive?

• Far from perfect, but I don't know what to answer here

• I don't delegate enough!

Is it difficult to practice with very sick patients given the severity of their illness? Do you ever find yourself completely helpless when faced with a patient whose situation touches you too emotionally?

• Yes.  I don't hide everything from my patients either. The team (MD colleagues, nurses, psychologists etc.) always there to share the good shots but also a good resource for the doctor in such situations!

• It is my daily practice to treat very sick people. Situations almost always affect me emotionally. If that weren't the case anymore, I would change jobs. These moments are both difficult but also enriching as a life experience. Over time, you learn to manage your emotions, while remaining close to the patients. It's important not to bring these emotions home and to organize decompression chambers...

How many hours of work per week on average for the average doctor

• Not sure, but more than 40 hours for sure! (More or = 50h)

• 55h

How would your colleagues describe you? 

• Hardworking, dedicated, determined

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What do you dislike most about your practice?

• This is not making an emergency, on the other hand, nothing can wait in oncology

• The feeling of never having finished...

How do you deal with the fact that there is a loss of patients in your specialty?  (Death ?)

• That's life.  Helping a patient at a critical time in their life is worth a lot. And we keep hope for the future...

• For my part, I give myself objectives from the start that I take care of a patient and I often know roughly the life expectancy of my patients from the start (according to scientific data). So I try to take them as far as possible, with the best possible quality of life and I'm happy if the patient exceeds the statistics. Of course we also have patients whom we cure!

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If you had to specialize in something else, what would it be and why?

• It is only when I am very tired that I would have liked to be in a specialty that required less integration of all aspects of a patient (multiple organ systems, psychological and emotional states, their families)

• Internal medicine, mainly for diagnostic challenges…

Does your specialty take jokes well at work?

• I think yes … !

• Not really

Do students/residents sometimes make you feel overwhelmed? 

• No

• Yes, often. Over time, we become more and more hyper-specialized and we abandon other fields. Yes, they make me realize that I am overwhelmed and I like to learn from them. On the other hand, I give them my experience, my experience in more specialized fields

If your specialty had to have a romantic relationship with another which one would it choose? 

• Pathology and radiology

• Internal medicine, because our patients make all the complications of medicine!