When Raymond Wadlow graduated from UVA’s medical school in May of 2000, he never imagined his mom would soon begin treatment at the teaching hospital where he had honed his clinical skills and put his empathy into practice.
He had just started his residency in internal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia when his mother was diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer.
At that point, Wadlow had been contemplating becoming a cardiologist like his stepfather. But after watching his mother’s battle—traveling with her to Texas for treatment in a clinical trial, sitting beside her at home after she entered hospice—he decided to pursue a career in oncology.
He chose as his specialty the same illness that would take her life on Oct. 18, 2001.
“The care she received was unbelievably inspiring,” says Wadlow, 51, now a medical oncologist and researcher at the Inova Schar Cancer Institute in Merrifield. “That’s what really led to my change of heart.”
Emily Couric was a powerhouse. An Arlington native, author, high school botany teacher and two-term state senator (and older sister of journalist Katie Couric), she had just embarked on a campaign for lieutenant governor, sharing a ticket with Mark Warner, when she received her cancer diagnosis.
She dropped out of the race, ceding her candidacy to Tim Kaine, but continued her legislative duties while undergoing chemotherapy. She became an outspoken advocate for pancreatic cancer research.
“She was a fantastic mother,” Wadlow says, “and just so inspiring with the way she handled her cancer. She didn’t miss any votes for the state senate. She would go to the Medical College of Virginia and get IV fluids when she was dehydrated and sick from chemo and still make it back for all of her sessions.”
She never quit, he says. So neither did he.
Wadlow was born at Inova Fairfax Hospital, just across the street from the medical campus where he works today. He moved with his mom to Charlottesville when he was in third grade, after his parents divorced and she remarried.
But Northern Virginia was his second home. On weekends, he traveled north to visit his dad, Raymond Clark Wadlow, an attorney living in Lake Barcroft, and his grandparents in Arlington, playing little league baseball and soccer in Arlington and Falls Church.
Medicine wasn’t a lifelong dream. At Dartmouth College, Wadlow played piano and rugby, majored in art history and studied abroad in Italy. He contemplated going to law school—until his mother “started sending articles about how miserable young corporate lawyers were,” he says. “She was getting into her political career and she helped me realize the importance of service.”
Observing the career of his stepfather, George Beller, he came to see medicine as a kind of service. He enrolled in pre-med classes and envisioned a different path, even though it meant maintaining a long-distance romance with his future wife, Jessica Drolet, whom he’d met at Dartmouth.
For a time, he and Drolet were in separate cities—she at Dartmouth, finishing her undergraduate degree, and then in New York, working on Wall Street; he in Boston, working as a hospital research assistant, then relocating to Charlottesville for med school at UVA. Eventually they were reunited when Drolet enrolled in UVA’s Darden School, where she earned her MBA.
The couple had just returned from their honeymoon in Bermuda in 2000 when Emily Couric received her cancer diagnosis and began treatment at the UVA medical center in Charlottesville.
During his residency in Philadelphia, Wadlow frequently spoke with and visited his mother and stepfather. “I think they tried to protect me,” he says. “When I came home intermittently for vacations and breaks, she was doing very well and still working.”
He accompanied them to San Antonio when his mom participated in a Phase 1 clinical trial with hopes of slowing her cancer’s progression. “As she got sicker, I was more involved,” he says. “But not having started my oncology fellowship yet, I didn’t fully understand all the details. I was straddling this line between young physician and son.”
He returned home to Charlottesville to be with his mother during her final days. “I don’t remember how long it was, but I was home for an extended period after she entered hospice and through the end of her life,” he says. “It was horrible and traumatic seeing her suffer. I never imagined my mother dying before I had a chance to have children so she could be a grandmother.”
Not to mention her political ambitions. He’d always assumed there was so much more she would do.
“After she died, my stepfather lobbied the university and Mark Warner to get a bunch of state funding,” he says. “They built a brand new, state-of-the-art cancer center at UVA that’s named after her, which is a huge part of her legacy.”
Arguably, so is Wadlow’s career. By 2004, the young doctor was working in a lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Brookline, Massachusetts, studying how cancer cells communicate with other cells in the body. He enjoyed the challenge and was passionate about the research, but he missed taking care of people.
Shifting gears, he began seeing patients as an oncologist at an affiliated clinic in Boston. In 2011, he moved with his family back to Virginia, accepting a position with Virginia Cancer Specialists in Fairfax. Having that human connection with patients is something he finds deeply meaningful, even when the prognosis is bleak.
“It’s a huge part of who I am,” he says. “It’s definitely a calling and provides me with a sense of purpose—not just the gratification of helping people but really being of service on a daily basis. Even if you can’t change the outcome, even when they have a terminal disease, it’s about caring. Just trying to make their quality of life as good as possible.”
Each Year, More than 67,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and 70% die within 12 months of diagnosis, making it the nation’s third deadliest cancer after lung and colorectal cancer. Roughly 8 in 10 patients with pancreatic cancer are already in advanced stages of the disease by the time they are diagnosed.
In 2020, Wadlow joined the Inova Schar Cancer Institute, where more than half of his patients have pancreatic cancer. The rest are being treated for colorectal and other GI cancers.
Early detection is a major focus of his work and ongoing research. “People have been nihilistic about pancreatic cancer screening for a long time,” he says. “Forever it was sort of a death sentence. People died within months. If you were cured, you were extremely fortunate.”
He and his colleagues are aiming to change the odds by advocating annual screenings to catch cancer in its earlier stages. Abdominal MRIs and endoscopic ultrasound may offer early detection in patients with a family history or genetic predisposition for pancreatic cancer. The preliminary data have been promising. “We need to define ways to detect pancreatic cancer earlier when it’s more curable,” Wadlow explains. The research community is currently working to develop a blood test that screens for pancreatic cancer, which he says will be more “cost effective” than other screening technologies.
In addition to family history, risk factors for pancreatic cancer include smoking, abdominal obesity, inactivity, a diet high in processed foods and saturated fats, chronic pancreatitis, heavy alcohol use, and a history of alcoholic or hereditary pancreatitis. “Those are the big ones,” he says. Symptoms of pancreatic cancer include jaundice, abdominal pain, nausea, diarrhea and unexplained back pain.
A few years ago, Wadlow’s aunt Katie Couric introduced him to Diane Simeone, director of the Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health. Simeone is also co-founder of the international Pancreatic Cancer Early Detection (PRECEDE) Consortium, which seeks to improve survival rates through early detection, screening and risk modeling.
Wadlow is enrolled as a patient in the PRECEDE study, in light of his family history (in addition to his mom, his great uncle also had pancreatic cancer). “I’m being proactive and getting screened,” he says. “I try to live a healthy life within reason. I try not to worry about it too much.” But the what-ifs are always in the back of his mind.
In February 2022, Wadlow opened a research site for PRECEDE at the Inova Saville Cancer Screening and Prevention Center off Gallows Road. As one of its principal investigators, he devotes a quarter of his time to disease research. He is also director of the Inova Schar Cancer Institute Hematology Oncology Fellowship program, a continuing education track for physicians specializing in GI cancers.
“We are making very, very modest improvements,” he says. Until recently, the five-year survival rate for patients with pancreatic cancer was 5%. This year it’s projected to be 13%.
He wishes he could go back in time, that his mother’s cancer could be detected early and that she could have been cured. “But I can’t,” he says. “It happened and it was terrible.”
In retrospect, witnessing her battle gave him a special kind of compassion for patients going through the same experience. “Things happen for a reason. It’s been a dominant part of my life. I can’t imagine a life of anything else.”
Last September, Wadlow was honored with The National Pancreas Foundation’s Clinical Excellence Award during the nonprofit’s annual Courage for a Cure gala, which raises money for pancreatic cancer research. Presenting the award was his stepfather, George Beller. The two remain quite close. Wadlow calls him a mentor, a role model and “really my best friend.”
“I loved my mother for marrying him,” he says.
Colleagues hold Wadlow in similar regard. “He’s a very conscientious doctor. He thinks a lot about his patients,” says Arthur Winer, a fellow oncologist at the Schar Center who lives in Arlington. “We collaborate all the time. I bounce cases off of him almost every day. I value his expertise and input in patient care.”
Timothy Cannon, a gastrointestinal oncologist who lives in Falls Church, describes Wadlow as “incredibly smart, compassionate and hard charging.”
Wadlow works long hours—more than 60 per week—but always makes it home in time for dinner with Jessica and whichever of their three kids are around. Their eldest daughter, Emily, is a junior majoring in religion and art history at Dartmouth. Their son, Colin, now finishing his first year at UVA, “is set on going to medical school,” says the oncologist. “He is very serious about his pre-med classes.”
Their younger daughter, Grace, 15, is finishing her freshman year at The Madeira School in McLean. A devoted foodie, she often cooks dinner for her parents and loves watching Grey’s Anatomy. Wadlow does the dishes.
They live in Herndon’s Oak Hill neighborhood, where Wadlow wakes at 5:30 a.m. to work out on the Peloton and treadmill in his basement. He attends a 7 a.m. men’s Bible study on Tuesday mornings and teaches Sunday school at Church of the Holy Comforter in Vienna.
He loves museums and the opera (his favorite is the Marriage of Figaro), mountaineering, black-diamond skiing and cheering for the Commanders during football season. He reads fiction when he needs a break from the heaviness of his profession. In March, he was reading Arcadia by Lauren Groff. Other authors whose works resonate include Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) and Marilynne Robinson (Gilead).
Over Memorial Day weekend, he and Jessica will return to the Bermuda resort where they honeymooned to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary.
“He somehow balances it all, which is really hard to do,” says his wife, a strategy and business consultant. “I call him my Renaissance man. He does everything.”
At work, the majority of Wadlow’s time is devoted to patients like Francesca “Cina” Deaton, 75, a retired community preschool principal who was diagnosed with ovarian and peritoneal cancer in 2020.
“There’s often a lot of diagnostic confusion between ovarian cancer and metastatic GI cancers because both types can spread within the abdomen,” Wadlow explains. The origins may not be immediately clear: “Is it an ovarian tumor or is it metastatic colon or stomach cancer that metastasized to the ovary? At first you can’t tell. Only when you get a biopsy does it all sort itself out.”
Deaton was referred to Wadlow before a biopsy confirmed that her cancer began in her ovaries. She didn’t want to switch doctors.
“Sometimes it’s traumatic and also delays things to have to switch to a different provider,” Wadlow says. “I was comfortable treating [her]. Back when I was with Virginia Cancer Specialists, I was doing a little bit of everything [so it wasn’t unfamiliar territory]. We got along well and she asked me to keep her. I think it’s worked out well.”
Now five years into her cancer journey, Deaton has faced setbacks. After an initial round of treatment, she remained cancer free until last July, when she learned it had returned.
At the time of this interview, she was receiving chemotherapy every three weeks. She and her husband, Larry, have been grateful for Wadlow’s calm, action-oriented approach, and especially his bedside manner.
“He’s such a great listener,” Deaton says, “so thoughtful and caring in a very genuine way. We’ve always felt like we were in good hands.”
“I just feel like he has a calling to do this,” she says. “I have a great deal of hope.”
Freelance writer Wendy Kantor lives in Herndon with her husband, children and her little dog, too.