She packed up the pictures of her patients, the ones who lived and those she couldn't save. She took a Physicians' Desk Reference in case she had "to look something up." And she grabbed a few files on groups she planned to work with.
Then, on the Saturday after Christmas, Audrey E. Evans, 85, closed her office door and retired from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
It was a quiet end to a storied career.
Evans had built one of the nation's foremost pediatric cancer programs. She cofounded the first Ronald McDonald House in 1974. And she was in the vanguard of pioneering oncologists who transformed children's cancer from a virtual death sentence to a disease that nearly 80 percent of patients survive.
Now she thought it was time to walk away. "I decided that I wasn't needed to do either clinical work or hands-on research," she says. "I didn't want to stay as a decoration."
Besides, her life's work was now in the hand of "her boys," oncologists John Maris and Garrett Brodeur, and a new generation of leaders she helped train.
Both men work on neuroblastoma, the most common solid-tumor cancer in children, which was Evans' specialty.
"It is way beyond me now," says Evans, who still rides horses regularly. Besides, "they're all bright as buttons."
Evans, who never wanted to be "a big cheese," had dreamed about being a doctor as a 5-year-old in York, England. Back then - the early 1930s - she was "willing to treat anybody for anything" with the bandages and antiseptic in her family's first-aid kit.
As a teen she contracted tuberculosis and couldn't attend school regularly. Yet in 1944, Evans still managed to follow her older sister to medical school in Edinburgh, Scotland.
She was confronted there by the patriarchal establishment of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. She wasn't allowed to eat with the men or sleep in the residency despite being on-call 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the entire six-month neurosurgery training program.
She didn't shrink from it. She took it on.
In 1953, she earned a Fulbright fellowship to pursue a residency at Children's Hospital Boston. There her career treating children's cancer was launched by legendary pathologist Sidney Farber, largely because no one else wanted to work for him.
"Who wanted to be with kids that die?" she asks.
Evans wasn't in a position to refuse the opportunity. On Farber's staff, everyone - doctors, residents, nurses, and social workers - collaborated without regard to a rigid medical hierarchy.
"Another door opened and I got into cancer and was completely enamored of it, probably in part because of Farber's total-care approach," she says. "If you couldn't cure the children, you could deal with the problems that arose and you could address the needs of the family."
She would employ that open approach throughout her career.
In the early years, much of Evans' work was on leukemia, but she also became fascinated by neuroblastoma, the most common form of cancer in infants.
In 1965, she was made chief of hematology-oncology at the University of Chicago-affiliated Wyler Children's Hospital. But it was a dead-end job.
"I was not very successful because, unfortunately, I was very untrained in grant writing," Evans says, "and the chief said I would not be promoted."
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