“The irony’s not lost — going from the physician to the caregiver to the patient,” Michael Zinner mused in June.

He was speaking by phone from his Florida home about the unusual and heart-rending way his professional life and personal life had intertwined through pancreatic cancer — his specialty as a surgeon.

There were the patients he operated on — seemingly too many to count in his years as a top surgeon, including 21 as chief of surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

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