MD Anderson Cancer Clinic

When I left for Houston last Monday morning, I had a picture in my mind of what MD Anderson Cancer Clinic looked like. Jim Chastain had tried to explain what it was like. His wife Leann described it as “vast.” I had it pictured as one monster-sized building. I exited the highway, turned back to the west and found  myself in a canyon of large buildings. “This must be downtown Houston,” I thought as I kept my eyes out for the large MD Anderson building. Then I realized that I wasn’t in downtown. I was in the medical district and most of the buildings around me were MD Anderson.

Construction on the MD Anderson hospital will double its size.

One view with a 24 mm lens can’t cover it all. All the buildings in this picture are related to the University of Texas’ MD Anderson Cancer Clinic. The building I’m standing on, the one next to that, and another across the street are part of the campus too. There’s another campus about a mile south of here, that has a few more buildings. I estimated for the representative from the communications office that if you combined Mercy Health Center, St Anthony’s Hospital, Southwest Medical Center, and OU Medical Center, you’d probably almost equal the size of MD Anderson. She pointed out that all those hospitals deal with gunshot wounds in their emergency rooms. They birth babies, run tests, and care for terminally ill patients. MD Anderson is that vast and all they do is deal with cancer.

Jim Chastain gets a CT scan at MD Anderson Cancer Clinic.

-John Clanton