What is it like to live with a dire diagnosis? Adam Stern, MD, has written extensively about his experience with metastatic kidney cancer. He's an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a graduate of Upstate's College of Medicine whose essays have been published in the New York Times and Boston Globe as well as the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association. During his time at Upstate, he received the Bruce Dearing Writing Award (in this 2011 video about the award winners, he can be seen from 2:06 to 3:16 and 5:28 to 5:43). He talks about cultivating gratitude and how, at the end of each day, he reflects on the times when he was mindfully engaged. "Those are the best moments of my days," he says. Click here and here for additional essays he has written about his experiences with cancer and here for a book of medically themed cartoons he created as a fundraiser for kidney cancer research.