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AWARDS

CONFERENCE COVERAGE2020
AMWA

Medical Writing &
Communication
Conference
Dates: TBD
Location: ONLINE

Trends and Opportunities for Medical Communicators

Hi, everybody. When I was first contacted by the American 

Medical Writers Association way back on February 18th and 

informed that I was the recipient of this year’s Walter C. Alvarez 

Award, I was so excited and honored and surprised and imme-

diately eager for the day when we could all be together. I ended 

my email, in fact, by saying ,“I can’t wait to see you.”

 It is very bittersweet to be with you today in this format, 

in my bedroom. Again, still, where I have spent so much time 

over the past several months looking at these 4 walls and that 

pile of laundry, right over there, that I will get to later.

 I have changed. And I’m sure that you have changed as 

well. We’ve changed in ways that are unique to every single one 

of us and we have changed collectively. Some of those changes 

have revealed themselves very slowly over time and some of 

them have been quite abrupt.

 I happen to know about both of those things, and so I 

thought maybe we could spend a little time today talking 

about that. Talking about those moments that define us and 

who we are. The ones that we see ourselves in terms of the 

before and the aftermath of. That first kiss, the loss of a parent, 

the birth of a child, an act of violence, a report on the news, 

a phone ringing in the middle of the night, or ringing in the 

middle of the morning.

 I’m going to tell you about the phone call that changed my 

life. This, as we say at the beginning of every comedy movie 

from the last 25 years or so, is me. Just a normal person on a 

summer day, maybe a little bit of an 

overachiever, maybe a little bit of a 

type A, because what good comedy 

doesn’t start with someone like that? 

Taking my first and what turned out 

to be my last trapeze lesson.

 This is me, less than a week 

later, on another summer day. I 

don’t think that I look very different, 

certainly not to a casual observer, 

although I see the changes. I see 

my older daughter, age 10, happy to 

have a day out, but I wonder what 

she was thinking. And I see my 

younger one, age 6, with her arms 

around me, and holding me protec-

tively. And me holding her. I’m wear-

ing a brand-new hat. It’s ridiculous, 

and I don’t like hats.

 I see something inscrutable in 

my face because I look at the camera 

and I know that this might be my last summer. Let me take you 

back a few days. It was 10:30 in the morning, August 11th. I was 

on a deadline for a story and it was my dermatologist. I had 

been in her office a week before to have 

her look at a weird scab on my head. I 

had not been worried about it at all.

 The first thing she said to me was “I’m 

so sorry.” So, I grabbed a piece of paper 

and I started writing. Malignant mela-

noma, underlined. Meet with and then, 

nothing, because I think she said the doc-

tor’s name too quickly. Lymph node biopsy. 

I didn’t really know at that point what 

lymph nodes are. I’m still a little unclear. I 

do, however, know that I am very ticklish 

when my lymph nodes are checked.

Mary Elizabeth Williams / Journalist and Author, A Series of Catastrophes and Miracles:  
A True Story of Love, Science, and Cancer

Every Person Is a Patient: Finding the Story in the Science

The Walter C. Alvarez Award is named in honor of Walter C. Alvarez, MD, a pioneer in the field of medical communication. The award is presented 
to either a member or nonmember of the American Medical Writers Association (AMWA) to honor excellence in communicating health care 
developments and concepts to the public. The Alvarez Award is presented during AMWA’s Medical Writing & Communication Conference.

WALTER C. ALVAREZ AWARD ADDRESS

Hello, this is your life now.



8    AMWA Journal / V36 N1 / 2021 / amwa.org        

 Oncology, that is a word I do know, so I underlined it. Set up 

surgery. See if it’s in the lymph nodes. To my everlasting shame 

I wrote it’s without the contraction, and that is very unlike me. 

Lymph I underlined again, will, underlined, do chest x-ray. 

Consultation, physical exam.

 At the end of that phone call, I was someone else. I was 

a patient. The following day, I met my brand-new oncologist 

because I was a person with an oncologist. And a few days after 

that, I had surgery. I had a couple of centimeters taken off the 

top of my head and with it the hair. I ever since have had a big 

old bald spot on the top of my head, and I have learned a lot 

about combovers.

 As you can see from this photograph, I also learned that if 

I thought my other hat was ridiculous, I was entering a whole 

new world of ridiculous hats. 

 I recovered. I found out 

that people have a lot of 

opinions when you get sick. 

Some of them are very help-

ful, some of them are not. 

And I began yet another 

new life, this time, as a 

“cancer survivor.”

 This was my life for 

a while. Three months to the day after I was diagnosed with 

cancer, my best friend was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. 

My father-in-law died of colon cancer. I went to the Rocky 

Mountains with a friend. I went to Orlando with my family, and 

we saw Hogwarts and drank butter beer and things were good, 

for a time.

 So record scratch, a year after my first diagnosis, I was diag-

nosed again. There had been some troubling spots in my lungs. I 

didn’t know that when I went in for my surgery that I already had 

a presumptive diagnosis of stage IV. I didn’t know that diagno-

sis carried a presumed 7 more months to live or that my odds of 

surviving 5 years were well below 10%.

 It was the beginning of the school year, and the likelihood 

that I was going to be around for the end of it was very slim. But 

I hit the jackpot. I became one of the first people in the world in 

a clinical trial for immunotherapy. I was one of the first 10.

 I became one of the first people in that trial to present no 

evidence of disease. And yet, when I look at my informed-con-

sent form, I see how little I understood. I understood maybe 

the word melanoma in that form. And as you can see, I put a 

question mark next to everything else.

 That is unfortunate. It is unfortunate that the phrase 

informed consent rarely delivers on the first part, and then by 

consequence, it’s very hard to get the second part. And I wish 

that that was different. And I believe that it can be, because we 

need to live in a world where information is clear, and consent 

is truly authentically possible.

 I spent 2 years in my clinical trial. I spent a lot of time at 

the hospital. At one point, I had a nurse tell me she had never 

taken that much blood out of one person in a single draw. And I 

was doing all of this while I was still working and parenting and 

living my life. Because that’s how it is. The experience of illness 

and treatment happens in our lives and our world. It does not 

occur on some separate plane in some other planet. And we are 

all seeing that in a very real way right now.

 We have to have context for our conditions because they 

are not discreet, and they don’t take place in a bubble.

 These photographs were taken about 2 weeks apart. 

[Editor’s Note: Faces of two children in the photo on the right were 

blurred for privacy reasons]

  You can probably guess 

the time of year. I took 

my daughters to meet Santa Claus and they asked me to come 

with them. I was really feeling the effects of my treatment at 

this point. It was pretty hard. And I was very tired. And my girls 

whispered something to Santa Claus, and when I asked my 

older daughter what they said, she told me, “I can’t tell you or it 

won’t come true.”

 And then a little while later, my family and I were with 

our cancer support group, and my phone rang, and it was my 

doctor. I had had my first set of scans that morning, and he told 

I hate sequels.



      AMWA Journal / V36 N1 / 2021 / amwa.org    9

me that I presented no evidence of disease. And I asked him, 

“Now what does that mean?” And then he explained it to me, 

and then I cried. And I went downstairs, and I told my daugh-

ters. They were in the midst of a birthday celebration. It was 

one of the happiest moments in, I think, all of our lives. And 

I took that photograph. That’s the moment that my daugh-

ters learned that their mom was going to be around. And very 

shortly after that photograph was taken, the moms of the other 

2 kids in that photograph died of cancer.

 I have now been cancer-free for 8 years, but I am always 

a patient. And sometimes that is a real badge of honor, and 

sometimes I wish that people could see me as more than just a 

patient. My doctor and I used to do a guest lecture at a  

translational medicine class at a prestigious medical school 

every spring. And every spring, the physician who taught it 

would introduce my doctor by listing all of his achievements 

and experience, and then he would turn to me and say, “and  

a patient.”

 I don’t think he ever bothered to learn my name. I don’t 

think he ever saw me as a human being with a story to tell. 

With an experience that informed the process of research. 

I think he saw me as cells on a slide. But I’m very fortunate 

because he was an exception.

 Which brings us almost to the present. I took this picture in 

Madison, Wisconsin. I was on a work trip and I stopped in for 

lunch before my flight home. It was the last time I was in a bar. 

It was the last time I had a conversation with strangers sitting 

next to me. There were 2 coworkers who came in from across 

the street for their lunch break and started talking. I had the 

grilled cheese with caramelized onions and fig jam. And a beer. 

And if I had known that I would not be doing this again for a 

very long time, I would have had dessert. It was the last time I 

was on an airplane. My life and the world have been very dif-

ferent ever since.

 And when I look at that photograph of a bunch of taps, I 

see something that is part of a health care story that is part of 

the story of 2020 and the pandemic that changed everything.

I think I got a little bit spoiled being in a clinical research trial. 

On the one hand, yeah, I was a medical experiment, and I 

didn’t know if I was going to live or die and I didn’t know if the 

treatment itself might kill me, but on the other hand, I got to be 

part of the process. I got to be a reporter, which is completely 

in my wheelhouse.

 I worked with a team of doctors and nurses and researchers 

who for the most part respected me and listened to me. I was 

a collaborator. And an active voice in what eventually became 

the story of a treatment that has gone on to change how we 

look at cancer and has radically altered countless lives, not just 

for patients, but for their parents, their children, their spouses, 

their colleagues, their students. It’s amazing. And it is truly one 

of the most epic things that ever happened to me.

 It also taught me that that is how it should be. I want to 

make it clear that I am not some Facebook mom who thinks 

that Googling makes me more educated than my doctors. What 

I am, though, is someone who has experienced what we all have 

in life, and particularly over the past few months, someone who 

knows that the medical world is the world that we live in.

 That health care is not a place or a single experience or 

procedure. Sickness, wellness, maintenance, chronic illness, 

mental health—they take place everywhere, all the time. All 

day long. In the absolute thick of our work and our parenting 

and going to school and taking care of our aging parents and 

financial insecurity and loneliness and love and fear and hope.

 I always bristle when I hear the phrase “clinical trial sub-

ject.” Because it implies that I was simply an object of study. 

And I was. But I was not just that. Being in that trial took effort. 

Being a patient takes effort. Walking around in a body every 

day takes effort. That is why I prefer the word “participant.”

 And right now, we are all participants. There is not a person 

in the world who doesn’t know what it is like to be slingshot 

into a health care crisis. There isn’t a single person who hasn’t 

seen the profound inequities that we face, the challenges that 

are unique to the most vulnerable among us, and who has not 

seen and depended on in a new way the underappreciated  

and often invisible work of the people who truly keep this 

world running.

 We need to be sensitive to that. We need to listen to that. 

We need to learn from that. We need to learn from each other. 

I’m so deeply honored and moved to be here with you, albeit 

virtually, in my bedroom. To be among people who have 

dedicated their careers to medical communication. I’m so 

impressed with you. I am so impressed with everything that 

you are doing to make sure that the science is translated accu-

rately and clearly, especially right now in an age where there is 

so much misinformation competing for our attention. And it is 

a very confusing and disruptive time.



10    AMWA Journal / V36 N1 / 2021 / amwa.org        

 Lately, I have been studying in the field of medical humani-

ties, and I have really been so edified to see that health care 

and humanities actually don’t have to be in competition with 

each other. That we can hold the dialectic and that concepts 

like critical thinking and listening and simple language are 

essential to the process.

 I know that humanities aren’t as sexy as data, but they are 

not decorative. They are essential for our survival. I have a 

friend who is a researcher, and at the beginning of this, I called 

him, and I said, “Talk me down.” And he said, “We’re going to 

get through this. It’s going to be a mess. But we’re going to get 

through this.”

 I spoke to him again recently and I said, “I need a pep 

talk,” and he told me about how over the past few months, 

even when spikes have been happening in different places and 

even when the news has been particularly grim, what he has 

seen have been the ways in which people have been adapting. 

The ways in which doctors and health care workers have been 

learning and the ways in which we all have been learning. We 

are all participating in the process of making a healthier and 

better world, every single one of us. And we’re all learning from 

each other. We’re learning what works. We’re learning how to 

improve the system of communication and of care. And that 

is what gives me hope in all of this. And that is not just about 

data. It is looking at people in context. Looking at the messi-

ness and the imperfection of our lives. The pile of laundry I 

believe I have mentioned.

 I hope that context gives a deep well of information and 

richness to diagnosis and treatment. When we see not just dis-

ease, but we see the people affected by it. When we see the cir-

cumstances. When we see—what better example than when 

we see preexisting conditions and we see the impact that they 

have on health care? Health care is not isolated. We are all our 

circumstances. We are all our stories. We’re all patients. We’re 

all participants. We’re all people, first and foremost.

 The only way through this is together. And the only way 

through this, as ever, is just by listening. So, thank you for lis-

tening to me today. Thank you for this award. Thank you for 

everything you do. I am so deeply appreciative.

Acknowledgment

I thank Elise Eller, PhD, Medical Writer and Consultant, 

Whitsell Innovations, Inc, for her help in bringing the tran-

script to the page.

Author declaration and disclosures: The author notes no commercial 
associations that may pose a conflict of interest in relation to this article.

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