The art of kintsugi
Together, two physicians find life lessons at its edge

“I have someone I’d like you to meet,” my residency program director said softly, his voice cutting through the quiet hum of my IV drip.
He sat across the room from me where I was propped up on pillows in a bed at Stanford Hospital. Outside, the COVID-19 pandemic raged, and visitors were limited. The isolation felt endless, days fading into nights, my thoughts broken only by the soft scuffle of nurses’ shoes and the steady beeping of monitors.
Just days earlier I had been making rounds in these very rooms, reviewing patients’ daily vitals and care plans at their bedsides, my scrubs crisp, pager buzzing. I’d made it 12 days into residency before waking one morning to find a mass on my neck — hard and as unyielding as the fear it brought with it. Now, instead of moving room to room as a newly minted doctor, I was confined to a hospital bed, grappling with my own diagnosis.
The biopsy had been definitive. Cancer. Every time I heard the word, it felt like the drop of a roller coaster.
My program director continued: “I can connect you if you’d like. I think she would understand what you are going through.”
I knew he must be referring to Brooke Gabster, MD — the only other internal medicine resident at Stanford Medicine with cancer. I had read an essay she wrote that was published in JAMA only months earlier. The piece was about her diagnosis of metastatic osteosarcoma at the age of 30 and read as a plea to her care team — and to doctors everywhere — to maintain the same urgency and conviction that patients feel as they’re fighting for their lives. Her words had stayed with me, but they had taken on a new meaning since my diagnosis.
Later that day, she introduced herself through email and shared her number. Her first words were, “Having cancer can feel overwhelming. Everyone told me to take it day by day, but I felt like I was just coping minute by minute.” This resonated, as the moments since my diagnosis had carried a different weight, like time itself had a new significance. Minutes after reading her email, I called her. For the next year and a half we spoke almost daily, sometimes all day long.
“Having cancer can feel overwhelming. Everyone told me to take it day by day, but I felt like I was just coping minute by minute.”
Advice Brooke Gabster shared with
Natasha Steele during their first email exchange
From the start, Brooke was my teacher. We were both diagnosed with cancer during our intern year, but she was a year ahead of me in navigating this new terrain and, as both a doctor and a patient, she had advice for me on everything. How to get second opinions, which nausea medications were the longest acting, which cancer mental health resources were absent of platitudes that would make you want to scream, how to style a wig without melting it, how to draw eyebrows onto your face (not too high up otherwise you’ll appear permanently surprised) and, most importantly, how to be a patient when you’re a doctor.
I was fluent in the language of treating illness, but unprepared to grapple with signs and symptoms of disease in my own body. We both knew about medicine and Kaplan Meier survival curves when we were diagnosed. But instead of remaining overwhelmed when her own life appeared on the graph, Brooke used this knowledge to take control, turning her training into a tool to confront cancer head-on. With her as my friend, the future somehow felt more manageable.
From the earliest days of our friendship, it was clear that Brooke was an absolute force. Beyond the accolades from Ivy League institutions and honor societies, what stood out about her was her magnetic personality and the mind-bending speed at which she lived her life. More than just speed, actually. She embodied this sense of grace — surrendering to the uncertainty of living with cancer while maintaining the focus and forward momentum needed to savor the present.
Brooke’s illness was grueling — she had endured more than 15 rounds of chemo, 15 hospital admissions, dozens of radiation treatments and multiple surgeries to remove cancer. Yet when we were together, she talked of traveling after the pandemic, publishing her writing, conducting research with Stanford’s Global Health team and, above all, her love for her family — her husband, parents and sister with whom she spent time daily. She quickly showed me that having serious disease didn’t always mean being sick. I was energized by her approach to illness — by the idea of disease as a catalyst for clarity and creativity.
Brooke and I were fast friends, accelerated by the urgency of living with cancer. Our illnesses had set us apart from our peers and co-residents, reshaping our sense of mortality and shadowing our every breath. Yet, in that shared struggle, we found a gentle closeness. She understood my unspoken fears, the quiet frustrations and the strange moments of humor.
With Brooke, I didn’t have to explain myself or be strong; I could just be. Despite COVID isolation and fragile immune systems, we’d spend cozy afternoons on the couch on Zoom or opt for distanced walks in the Palo Alto sun. When either of us would get medical news we’d always send a quick update — and for Brooke, the news was increasingly challenging.
Brooke — adept at everything — was determined to become an expert in the very pathology that was spreading through her bones. One afternoon we sat in her living room surrounded by the most recent literature on osteosarcoma. Case studies, reviews, all mixed with her own imaging reports and pathology. Brooke had gathered second and third opinions from across the country — there was a research lab growing cells with her tumor mutation to test different medications — and she had an all-star home team helping her weigh options.
She felt alive and wanted to keep moving forward, brimming with energy and ideas.
She was full of hope. Still, I could sense her fear. She took a deep breath and softly shared, “I am worried my doctors are resigned that I’ll die.” We sat quietly for a while. Her future felt like sand slipping through our fingers.
Brooke spent each day overcoming the challenges of life with osteosarcoma and considered herself a cancer survivor. She resisted being defined by others’ perceptions of her disease and fumed when her doctors seemed to decide what mattered to her — like not pausing to discuss chemo’s impact on fertility, as if a shortened lifespan meant preserving it wasn’t a priority. When her care team started to mention palliative care, Brooke pushed back. She felt alive and wanted to keep moving forward, brimming with energy and ideas.
A few weeks later, Brooke’s scans showed the chemotherapy treatments weren’t working, and her doctors suggested she travel to Texas for experimental CAR-T cell treatment. She was venturing into uncharted waters, while I remained on a strict regimen of first-line therapy. I felt guilty and helpless as I knew she was getting sicker — like our paths that had been so intricately connected were now pulling apart.
While Brooke was hospitalized in Texas, I went into remission and finished my cycles of chemotherapy. As I mentally and physically prepared to return to work, I called Brooke, scared. “No one is going to understand me.” I told her. “I don’t feel ready to go back.”
“Your patients will understand you!” she said, laughing. But then in a more serious tone, she added, “You were never ready to leave, and it might take a while before you fully feel like you belong again,” summing up the sometimes opposite magnetic forces between physician and patient identities.
Brooke came home from Texas, and I could tell things were different. Eating had become painful and cumbersome, and she had less of that boundless energy. One afternoon I slipped off the wards to accompany her to a doctor’s visit, as the pandemic restrictions meant only hospital staff and patients could be present. When the visit ended, I helped her out of the patient gown and back into her clothes. It was the first time I could see beneath her polished surface, how thin she had become. I felt a thud of shame to be back on the other side of the stethoscope without her.
I was working overnight in the hospital when her husband called me to say Brooke had grown much sicker and was being admitted to Stanford Hospital’s intensive care unit. I felt my cheeks flush and my heart race as I ran toward the floor she was on.
When I arrived, Brooke had already received sedating medications, and a ventilator was supporting her ability to take each breath. It looked just like the one residents use to learn about the physiology of life support, but this one was turned on and hard at work. I sat at her bedside for a while, holding her hand, whispering thank you to her as tears rolled down my face.
Having taught me what it means to be a patient, she was now shaping the kind of doctor I was becoming, opening the aperture of my dual physician-patient lens.
Brooke used to talk about the art of kintsugi — the Japanese tradition of mending broken pottery with gold. Although cancer had fractured the life she had envisioned for herself, she was determined to seal her story with meaning and strength — like the gold filling in the cracks — making the pottery whole again, somehow more beautiful.
When Brooke died, some part of me shattered, too. A friend who was by my side through the hardest part of my life was inexplicably gone — and all the science and medical technology in the world hadn’t been enough to save her.
When I was back at work seeing patients, I started to see Brooke everywhere in the hospital. “Don’t call him a cancer patient — say patient with cancer,” she’d remind me on rounds — separating the person in front of me from the disease that they carried. “Take more time with this family; they’re scared,” she’d whisper out of nowhere as I noticed nervous parents in the waiting room. Having taught me what it means to be a patient, she was now shaping the kind of doctor I was becoming, opening the aperture of my dual physician-patient lens.
And in the quiet moments outside the hospital — in my moments of solitude or experiencing the tender magic of watching my daughter grow — I found her there, too, cheering me on. And slowly, in my grief, I was able to create my own kintsugi — my own restorative meaning from the remarkable things I learned from my friend.
Brooke will forever remain my teacher — pushing me to see life as a creative act and fight even harder for the people and the work that gives my life meaning. Encouraging me to love and be loved, without any guarantee of what lies ahead. Telling me to care more deeply and empathetically for my patients, for my people and for myself. And gently urging me to embrace two truths at once — the joy and immense beauty of life and its finitude.
Natasha Steele, MD, MPH, is a hospitalist and a clinical assistant professor of medicine at Stanford Medicine. Contact her at medmag@stanford.edu.