But it’s not his personal accomplishments Heslin points to as his greatest successes. It’s the contributions he and his team members have made in setting up a cooperative network of cancer care that has impacted the lives of so many stricken with the disease. In streamlining the process from diagnosis to evaluation and treatment plans, through the UAB Cancer Center’s Integrated Multidisciplinary Cancer Care Program, his network has made the unbearable more straightforward for families in crisis.
Long before Heslin earned a string of acronyms and heavyweight career titles to his name, he was an Eagle Scout who made a pledge to live by a code of honor: “On my honor, I will do my best to make by training and example my rank and my influence count strongly for better citizenship in my troop and in my church and in my community, and in my contacts with other people.”
Now a professor with the UAB department of surgery, executive vice chair with the department of surgery and director of the division of surgical oncology, it’s that same sense of honor that guides his personal and professional life. It started with a simple ambition to be a doctor.
“I wrestled in college, and like many athletes, I thought about going into sports medicine,” Heslin said. “It would have been a comfortable link between my past life and future life.”
But when Heslin, former captain of Cornell University’s wrestling team, was in his medical residency in research at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the opportunity to evaluate mechanisms of cancer convinced him that oncology was the real fit for him.
“Cancer made more sense to me,” said Heslin, who studied weight loss in cancer patient for two years. “It fit a lot of the different aspects of taking care of patients. As a surgeon, you send patients back to the referring doctor. In surgical oncology, you follow them long-term.”
For Heslin, the field was a win-win. It allowed him to maintain relationships with his patients as they battled their disease, as well as giving him the ability to tie in those cases with research by setting up a tissue bank and collaborating with scientists. As a surgical oncologist, he was also positioned to work with patients diagnosed with varied types of cancer, from organ-based colorectal cancer to head and neck tumors and all points between.
“Being a surgical oncologist emphasizes multi-disciplinary care for complex cancer problems,” Heslin said. “It’s a rewarding process to follow a patient over a number of years, but it also carries a significant amount of emotional risk.”
Heslin, who specializes in the research and treatment of gastrointestinal cancers and soft-tissue sarcomas, points out the positives – to know a patient for years and see them become survivors is rewarding.
“You feel great about giving them the opportunity to live a longer life,” he said. “There is also a group of patients who have a terminal disease, and you help care for them through the process of dying. The more involvement you have with patients near the time of death, the more you get to know them. To a large degree, that involvement leads to a little part of you dying with the patients.”
Maintaining a balance in such diametrically opposed circumstances is as difficult as it is essential.
“You have to recognize that dying is part of life,” Heslin said. “You try to help patients through that process in a way that makes it not such a negative. One of the most important things I do is talk to patients and families. No one escapes death. Our goal as cancer doctors is to keep a patient functional as long as possible, but when the time comes, you have to realize that’s part of it.”
Heslin began at UAB in 1996 when he moved his wife and three children from New York to Birmingham, a culture shock to be sure. By 2001, Heslin was associate professor of surgery at UAB, and his family was an integral part of the community where they established roots. That’s when his vision for comprehensive care for cancer patients became reality.
“Cancer care is still a team sport,” Heslin said. “I’m proud of what we’ve created here. In collaboration with our integrated cancer care coordinator, Suzanne McNeill, and Ed Partridge, the head of the cancer center, we started a multidisciplinary oncology clinic.”
Heslin’s multidisciplinary oncology clinic at UAB includes nine different specialties along with a veritable dream team of coordinators and physicians who care for patients suffering from cancers of all ilk.
“When we started the process in 2001, it was based on the principal that patients are scared when they get a diagnosis,” Heslin said. “They don’t know who to call. We inserted Suzanne in the process to organize the right tests in the right order and to be sure patients are seeing the right doctors the first time. We try to do everything the same day or within two days and arrange it so patients see physicians in the Kirklin Clinic. We have patients or families who drive a long way to see us, and they can’t come back for more tests. It’s more complicated for them to do that.”
With the clinic in place to facilitate the best cancer care possible, Heslin now wants to spearhead a new peer and professional review process with balanced representation for physicians and for patients and families.
“We are resolute in our commitment that we both provide advocacy for professionals, as well as holding them accountable to one professional code,” Heslin said of his goal to minimize stresses on physicians while ensuring quality patient care.
The Eagle Scout in him has long honored his commitment to family, which has been in place since he and wife Amy relocated to Alabama when the oldest of their three sons, now 22, 19 and 17, was only three years old.
“I was always involved in coaching my kids when they were growing up,” Heslin said. “I think it’s a commitment you make from the time the first kid enters sports until the last kid leaves.
“Birmingham has been good for our family. There are characteristics of UAB and Birmingham that would be very hard to find in other places.”