Michelle Park, a piano teacher, was in treatment for acute myeloid leukemia in 2014 when she entered the lobby at Fred Hutch Cancer Center and heard the familiar strains of a favorite Debussy piece, Claire de Lune.
A musician sat at the piano, playing “Song of the Moonlight,” one of Park’s favorite pieces, for patients coming and going. Park vowed that she would sit at that bench when her doctors gave her the all-clear.
Park’s cancer had come fast and aggressive when she was 54. In 2016, two years after her diagnosis, she had a bone marrow transplant. Her medical oncologist, Bart Scott, MD, holder of the Miklos Kohary and Natalia Zimonyi Kohary Chair, told her about a Phase 1 clinical trial that would deliver radiation to her leukemia cells. She decided to participate. “They saved my life,” said Park, who lives in Covington, Washington. “I was patient number nine.”
After her diagnosis, Park had to close down her piano studio because her ability to fight infection was very low, which meant she couldn’t be around children. “Fred Hutch said drop everything, so I did,” she said. “But I knew then that when I got better, I wanted to come back and play.”
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In 2018, she got the green light. She arrived at her piano studio on a scooter because she was contending with graft-versus-host disease, a common transplant side effect that had made it difficult for her to walk. Park describes the sclerosis as walking with “concrete legs.”
But she could still use her hands.
Park plays for 1.5 hours weekly on Thursday mornings at Fred Hutch. The time goes so quickly that when her slot is over, she is always surprised. She plays on the sixth floor of Building 1, where she spent many hours while she was in treatment. “I used to sit there as a patient waiting to see my team so I know that feeling of sitting there, wondering,” she said.
Sometimes, patients sleep. Sometimes patients come up and identify the song she’s playing and say, ‘I used to play that when I was young.’” Once, a patient approached to say that he appreciated her music, telling her “that was the best antidepressant I’ve had today!”
Drawing on her own experience, Park chooses her piano selections with care. Classical pieces such as “Reverie” by Schumann or “Consolation” by Liszt conjure up a serene mood. Pop compositions such as “Sailing” by Christopher Cross with its apropos lyrics — “Oh, the canvas can do miracles” — conjure up the sailboats on Lake Union in the summertime. The song seems fitting as patients gaze upon that view from the clinic waiting room.
“I know what it’s like to be on this journey,” said Park. “I pull out music that tries to trigger a memory, a feeling of calm and peace.”
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Bonnie Rochman is a staff writer at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. A former health and parenting writer for Time, she has written a popular science book about genetics, "The Gene Machine: How Genetic Technologies Are Changing the Way We Have Kids—and the Kids We Have." Reach her at brochman@fredhutch.org.
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