Dr. J. Reece Jones

“My name is Reece Jones. I’m a physician here at Southern Cancer Center. I’ve been here since 2013.

At home on a weekend I’m spending time with my family. We’re hanging out watching TV, watching movies, watching sports. We’re chasing the kids around to various events. Whether it’s school, their sporting events, going to sporting events, swimming in the pool, boating in the river. Anything that that gets us together as a family. Because unfortunately, I don’t get to see my family as much as I would like during the week from work and the activities they have. So we’re playing a little catch-up time on the weekends.

Relaxation is big for me. I have to be able to turn it off a little bit at night. One thing I like to do is read. I like history. Civil war history is always been a little bit of a passion. I grew up in Mississippi close to Vicksburg. When I was a kid, I didn’t really understand what the civil war was, but there was a battlefield memorial, so we would drive around. Actually as a child I found some civil war bullets in this gully next to a hotel we were staying in. Maybe that’s where a little bit of this passion comes from.

The patients definitely become part of my family without a doubt. I mean to be quite honest I tell my wife this, I spend more time with my patients than I do with my family. It’s just a nature of the business. And obviously when I get home I try to do everything I can to be with my family. But the amount of time we spend and the personal relationship we established, you can’t help but them become a part of your family and care about them deeply.

Chemotherapy scares people. There’s a lot of preconceived notions going on in terms of sickness and hair loss and nausea and vomiting, because maybe they saw a relative go through that in the past. So there is a lot of fear, not only with the diagnosis but with the treatment that comes with it. And so a lot of my job in the beginning is to try to calm their fears. Not only for the disease they have, but that the treatment that’s coming. That hey, we can get you through this. We can support you with medications and help you get through an aggressive treatment with relatively minor toxicity.”