Comic-Turned-Oncologist Finds His Way Back to the Stage

As a young musical comic playing the New York club scene in the 1980s, Stuart Bloom had big dreams.

“I was going to be rich and famous — a humanities guy,” he said.

“Science was for geeks,” he thought back then.

These days, though, he’s singing the burnout blues as an oncologist and hematologist; now a self-professed “science geek”; and the writer, director, and star of his own stage show: How to Avoid Burnout in 73 Minutes.

“I never thought I would be a doctor,” said Bloom, who attended the graduate acting program at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and has a few notable acting credits to his name, including a role in the national tour of the Broadway musical Doonesbury and a part (and songwriting credits) for New York’s Side Street Scenes.

Then, he watched his dad die from cancer. Navigating the medical and emotional cancer journey, as a family member, proved life altering.

“It was almost like I heard a gong. I was 30, I wasn’t rich and famous, and I (realized I) should be a doctor,” he recalled.

Never mind that he hadn’t seen the inside of a classroom in over a decade and that he’d be 43 before he even entered medical practice. His wife reasoned, however, that he’d eventually be 43 anyway, so he might as well do what he wants to do.

With that nudge, he decided to go all in.

“At first, it was like I was a complete alien in this world — it was completely foreign to me,” he said. “Sometimes I look back at the journals I was keeping at the time and it’s crazy — it was a completely different way of looking at the world.”

As his knowledge grew, so did his passion.

“I learned to love my inner geek. The only reason all the science made sense to me was because I just really loved it…it satisfied something so deep within me,” he recalled of his days as a medical student.

Nearly two decades later, the Minneapolis-based oncologist reflects on the privilege of caring for his patients and on the production that brought together his passion for medicine, music, and humor.

Throughout medical school, residency, and fellowship, Bloom continued writing funny little tunes like those he once performed in clubs to get a laugh and make a buck. The tunes highlighted the challenges, and comedy, of his new life as a doctor in training.

“In residency, I wrote an operetta about what it’s like to be a resident: ‘Miserable Wretches are We,'” he recalled, chuckling at the memory. Mostly he just shared the songs with classmates to keep the laughs coming and stay connected to his love for musical comedy.

“It’s kind of the way I journaled,” he explained.

A few decades passed, and as he approached his 60th birthday, Bloom realized he had this big collection of songs — and they “had an arc to them.”

“Do I have a show here?” he wondered. “Do I want to do a show? I hadn’t performed in a long time and I didn’t really miss it, but then I realized: I’m around people all the time who have all these great plans…they wait their whole life for retirement, and the next day they feel a lump and they’re gone in 3 months.”

His own cancer diagnosis at the age of 49 reinforced his conviction to give the musical comedy a try. Because of his family history of colon cancer, Bloom went in for a screening colonoscopy. His doctor found stage I colon cancer.

“A cancer diagnosis really does change the way you think and live,” he said. “We’re put here for reasons we may not be aware of, and I would rather commit sins of commission rather than omission.”

So Bloom went for it.

His show, How to Avoid Burnout in 73 minutes, opened in 2019 in Minneapolis, with four performances that sold out months in advance. The show closed as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold over the world but reopened in September 2021, again to sold-out venues.

The show tracks his career, from a young singing comedian to an oncologist, through a dozen songs representing a “burnout questionnaire” that he completes using his inner voice, played by journalist and actor Eric Ringham as his onstage sidekick.

“Along the way he grapples with ego, mortality, and spirituality, in the face of pressure from health insurance companies and medical administrators who wish he’d stop swearing during dictations,” a blurb on the show’s website reads.

Through his songs, Bloom pokes fun at the challenges and frustrations of navigating medical practice and insurance red tape: “I click a box,” he sings, lamenting the mind-numbing task of medical records documentation in his song aptly titled, “Click a Box.”

“There’s never only one — I click another box. Still I am not done, ’cause there’s another box,” the song continues. That one gets the crowd riled up in shared frustration, he said.

Here’s a clip of “Click a Box?”

His songs also telegraph his love for patient care and his passion for life. “What if Life Matters?” is one he considers particularly meaningful. And he pulls no punches when it comes to exploring life’s complexities and challenges.

Here’s a clip of “What If Life Matters?”

A professional-quality film of the production will be available soon for those who missed the live performances.

Life’s Spiral

As the saying goes, art imitates life. Bloom knows a thing or two about burnout.

He recalls a particularly tough day in 2020, a long day of hard conversations with patients. As he was finishing his notes, he hit a hard stop.

“I couldn’t do anything unless I filled out 27 pain care plans for 27 different patients — even though they were all home and pain free and their information was in their chart — all because our group had made an arrangement with some insurer to click more boxes,” he said. “I wondered, ‘How did I get here? How does this help patients?’

“It was just all the crummy stuff that all of us have to deal with…we mainly burn out because of the bullshit around the way we deliver dare,” he said. “I never let it affect patient care and I never forgot what a privilege it was, but I didn’t want to keep doing it for the group I was doing it for.”

After 20 years as a community oncologist/hematologist, he joined the Division of Hematology, Oncology and Transplantation, University of Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis, as the associate director of physician and faculty well-being. He still see patients but focuses mainly on teaching trainees and addressing burnout.

One way to avoid burnout, Bloom has found, is to go to a program that supports what you’re doing.

Another is to create connection, he said.

For Bloom, humor has always been an important way to connect with patients. During the ASCO Voices session at this year’s annual meeting, Bloom spoke about the importance of humor in medicine — or, more specifically, about why he doesn’t give talks on the importance of humor in medicine (spoiler alert: Such talks are invariably a bore, he said).

These kinds of sessions are “earnest, they’re sincere, and they are the most unfunny things you can experience,” he said, recalling cringy talks with photos of clowns and charts showing the “physiologic benefit of a good belly laugh.”

Instead, he offered this advice to oncologists: Share something of yourself with patients.

“I go in (to the exam room), I keep my heart open, and I listen — often without solving — and we usually bump up against something to chuckle about,” he said. “In my experience, humor leads to connection, and that’s where the care takes place.”

But, Bloom clarified, while humor is an integral part of who he is and helps him connect with patients, there are other ways to do so, like sharing your passions or interests.

Reflecting on his own journey, Bloom sees his life coming full circle — back to his roots in acting, music, and comedy — but with a twist.

“I think it was Yeats or somebody who said history is not really cyclical — it’s more like a spiral where you come back to the same place you were before but maybe at a level higher,” Bloom said.

“That seems to make sense to me — it kind of feels like that, and it really is meaningful,” he said.

Bloom is continuing that spiral, working on his next musical, which takes place in an assisted living situation called “Assisted Loving.”

“The facility is attached to a medical school, and residents can live there for free if they agree to be poked and prodded and investigated and interviewed by medical students and staff,” he explained.

“It has been fun to work on.”

Sharon Worcester, MA, is an award-winning medical journalist based in Birmingham, Alabama, writing for Medscape Medical News, MDedge, and other affiliate sites. She currently covers oncology, but she has also written on a variety of other medical specialties and healthcare topics. She can be reached at sworcester@mdedge.com or on X: @SW_MedReporter.