Issue link: http://catalog.e-digitaleditions.com/i/146463
' S C O P E S M A G A Z I N E J U LY 2 0 1 3 |3 From grade school to post graduate school W ith as much conviction as one can muster, Dr. Vanessa Rizzo believes that even when the death grip of cancer has taken hold, there can be value to taking steps that will postpone the inevitable. To do this with as little pain and as much quality as possible, people and pets need skilled oncologists, and although Dr. Rizzo's path to veterinary school was not necessarily straight, once enrolled, her course to helping people deny cancer's devastation has been scalpel-sharp. A second-year oncology resident at the Cornell University Hospital for Animals, Dr. Rizzo is both a teacher and a student. Sharing her knowledge with veterinary students and those completing one-year internships, she finds satisfaction in preparing more minds to tackle the amazing and confounding disease known as cancer. As a student herself, she says that Cornell's residency program is one of the best in the nation. "I feel so grateful to have been accepted into this program," said Dr. Rizzo. "And if I'm good at my job it's only because I have an amazingly supportive team helping me. Everything I do for my patients and my clients is done after consulting with those in the oncology service and sometimes after consultations with doctors and staff from other services as many of our patients don't just have cancer: they have other diagnoses that need to be addressed so that we can help them maintain a good quality of life." The residency program at Cornell is the final three years of a 12-year quest to become board-certified in a specific area of medicine. The additional training provides residents with a high level of proficiency in the clinical discipline. Each program allows the resident to meet the post-graduate education requirements of the national governing board related to that discipline as well as to gain experience in professional veterinary medical education and in teaching. In addition to the oncology residency, the College offers more than a dozen residency programs and has approximately 60 residents enrolled every year. Cancer has special significance for Dr. Rizzo as she grew up surrounded by the disease: her grandmother died of cancer before she was born; her great aunt survived several kinds of cancer; she watched a school friend deal with cancer in the eighth grade; a family friend died of lung cancer when she was 16; her mother is a breast cancer survivor; and her brother-in-law survived brain cancer. "As a child, I had a rudimentary understanding of cancer as a disease," said Dr. Rizzo. "I knew that sometimes you died and sometimes you didn't. My first cancer case as a veterinary student opened my eyes. I started reading about the biology and pathophysiology of cancer and was hooked. Although you can simplify the condition by saying that cancer develops when cells go haywire, its a multitude of different diseases, each with its own microenvironment and behavior." These behaviors can make life difficult. As a specialist, Dr. Rizzo hopes to make horrible days a little better by being as informative and honest as possible with her clients. Long-term, though, Dr. Rizzo dreams of changing the prospects for those targeted by cancer through life-changing comparative clinical research initiatives. "When animals naturally develop cancer, the knowledge that we gain from treating these animals has enormous potential to help develop new treatments for children," said Dr. Rizzo. "Dogs and children share many of the same diseases. We need to do a better job of sharing data between the species. Completing this residency will help me do that." TEACHING |