My name is Patrick Dillon, and I work at the University of Virginia in the breast center, and I take care of cancers of the breast. What I primarily focus on is part of a multi-disciplinary team is that I do endocrine therapies, chemotherapies, and some investigational immunotherapies for breast cancer. 

I think I've always been drawn to oncology because of a lot of family members of mine who have been afflicted by cancer. And then also as a researcher, I've always been really intrigued with the idea that if we combine the right drugs or the right treatments, we might be able to alter the course of cancer and perhaps find cures for cancer one day. So anybody coming to the cancer center for the first time is going to meet a multi-disciplinary team, meaning that they're going to meet a breast surgeon as well as a radiologist, likely including a geneticist, and eventually involving me as a medical oncologist, who deals with the endocrine therapies and the chemotherapies. 

But we do that as a team. And as an additional important part of the team, there's also going to be dieticians. There's going to be chaplains. There's social workers. So we all work together to try and get people through this long, sometimes arduous process that is the journey of cancer. 

I guess what really fulfills me about being a doctor is that I get a chance to see patients at their worst sometimes, and then through the course of therapy, I then get to see them at their very best at the end of the journey, and all the way through that, I get to know their family. I get to know what challenges are facing them, and I get to know them beyond just their diagnosis. I get to know them as a person. That, to me, is really fulfilling.