Facing Cancer

As an oncologist and chief physician in Boston, Massachusetts, Wolfram Goessling battles a disease that spreads terror around the world: Cancer. As a doctor he strives to cure it, as a scientist he researches it, as a professor at Harvard Medical School he teaches others how to treat it. 

But when one day his family doctor tells him that the pimple on his face is not a pimple, but an angiosarcoma - a particularly insidious cancer that is difficult to cure - he is suddenly forced to change sides. The doctor becomes the patient at Brigham and Women's Hospital, where he was trained. Cancer is no longer just his profession, but also his destiny - and the probability of his survival is 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 family man who fights to stay alive; the doctor and scientist who holds no illusions and knows his disease inside out; as well as the doctors who strive to save him and his family who suffers along with him. “Facing Cancer” is a powerful and emotional film about hope and its price - and about the light at the end of the tunnel.