Facing Cancer
Featuring a post-screening Q&A with director Volker Heise and Dr. Wolfram Goessling.
As a physician and researcher in Boston, Massachusetts, Wolfram Goessling battles a disease that affects patients around the world: Cancer. As a doctor he strives to cure it, as a scientist he researches it, as an educator and professor at Harvard Medical School he teaches others how to treat it.
But when one day his dermatologist tells him that the small lump on his face is not a pimple, but an angiosarcoma - a particularly aggressive cancer that is almost impossible to cure - he is suddenly forced to change sides. The doctor becomes the patient at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital, two institutions where he has trained. Cancer is no longer just his profession, but also his destiny - and the chances of his survival are just four percent.
He takes up the fight, undergoing chemotherapy that robs him of the feeling in his fingers; radiation that burns his skin; and an operation that takes half his face and alters his appearance forever. He is treated by his friends and colleagues who are now his doctors.
The story is told from the perspectives of the patient whose life is at stake; the husband and father who fights to stay alive; the physician and scientist who holds no illusions and knows his disease inside out; and it features the doctors who strive to save him and his family that suffers along with him. “Facing Cancer” is a powerful and emotional film about hope and sacrifice - and about the light at the end of the tunnel.
