It’s not easy having a cheerful outlook on life when you’re living with metastatic cancer. But for Scarborough resident Nelda Lozinski, “For now, I get to see the sunrise; I get to see the sunset.”

The 67-year old grandmother was first diagnosed with colon cancer in 2006 after having a colonoscopy at the Birchmount campus of The Scarborough Hospital. By that time, however, the cancer had already spread to her liver. After an operation on her colon, Nelda was referred to the Oncology Clinic at the General campus for chemotherapy.

That’s where she met Medical Oncologist Dr. Henry Krieger and asked him to take her on as a patient.

“If it wasn’t for the personalized care I receive from Dr. Krieger, I wouldn’t be alive today,” Nelda insists, explaining a surgeon who operated on her liver twice “credits Dr. Krieger’s chemotherapy formula.”

“It’s the formula Dr. Krieger prescribed for me that reduced the massive tumour on my liver to the size where they were able to operate on me,” Nelda explains. “I am able to tolerate the formula quite well with minimum side effects.”

That level of appreciation from cancer patients is not uncommon, yet Dr. Krieger says “it reinforces my feeling and encourages me to know that I can offer help to my patients.”

“Sometimes, colleagues ask me if I’m going to retire, and one of the reasons I haven’t really looked into it is that I still very much enjoy what I’m doing; I enjoy helping people,” adds Dr. Krieger, who as been a Medical Oncologist at TSH since 1975. “I also enjoy working at the hospital and have a great comfort level here. 

“Medicine is becoming more technical and less personal, but at our hospital, we still retain some features that make people feel they are individuals and not a number.”

He notes the trend in treating cancer has changed dramatically over the past three decades.

“Treatment is becoming more targeted, more specific, as opposed to what we used to do, such as general chemotherapy,” he explains. “We’re also seeing more success in the cancers we treat, and we’re seeing more ability to treat certain cancers that we couldn’t treat even 10 years ago.”

The father of two was born in Austria to Polish Jewish parents, and moved to Toronto when he was 20 months old. In his spare time, Dr. Krieger enjoys tennis, golf, reading and collecting wine. With four grandchildren under age 4, “I am lucky enough to have them close by and get to see a lot of them.”