For those who joined on my first day here, you know that my mother has cancer. Large B Cell Lymphoma. She’s been fighting for two years and fighting hard: radiation, chemo, more radiation, five rounds of hospitalized chemo and an injection of a radioactive antibody called Zevalin. Today we learned the cancer is back. I posted a Top 10 today about being a pro-active patient because it took exactly five business days to get the biopsy results—the average time it should. The wait was long, though. You know about the wait, don’t you. Every day you wonder—should I be hopeful? Not think about it? How do you not think about it? So I called Carolyn, an amazing oncology nurse at UCSF. We talked about The Wait. The Top 10 are from my conversation with her. She feels so strongly that patients should understand NOT to wait too long for test results. She knew one patient who thought that since his doctor didn’t call with the test results, he was actually fine. Wrong. A year and a half later, he had an advanced form of lung cancer. Only you can be in charge of your health care. It’s better to know, even if it hurts in the heart. It’s better to know.
News Room
October 16th, 2007 · 1 Comment
The Biopsy is Back
Tags: Prevention
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1 Language_and_Mind // Oct 21, 2007 at 10:44 am
These events, and the biopsy, have a special resonance for me. But first let me say, I shuddered, Carol, when I read that your mom has cancer. Somehow, massive hideous challenges have a way of piling on… but when they strike those who are strong, and maybe even, as here, strike again, something miraculous happens. The rest of us see that someone strong is going to fight and is going to cope. And just like that, the rest of us learn something about how to be strong and how to cope. Remember that maxim: if you want something done, give it to a busy person? Maybe the analogue here is: if you want to learn how to survive a massive challenge, give it to a strong person. Thanks for teaching the rest of us, Carol, thanks for again showing us your strength. As for the biopsy, decades ago—when I was just finishing high school—my mother got breast cancer. For her, too, there was piling on. The breast cancer diagnosis was barely three years after my father had a major stroke, which paralyzed him, caused substantial brain injury, and left him in a wheelchair, a shadow of the person he had been. Yes, the world became awfully dark. My mother delivered the news. She was going to have a biopsy, and if malignancy was found, she was going into surgery immediately. And so she did. She had a radical mastectomy, and it all happened within 24 hours. But she and her doctor wanted to get, and got, the biopsy results ASAP. That piece was critical. While the surgery was decades ago, she is alive and vibrant today. My father survived six more years after the mastectomy, all the while cared for by my mom; she was with him everyday, whether he was in hospitals (which he often was) or at home. She coped, and she showed her strength and coping skills to her young children. She has tended to be a calm, soft-spoken, non-abrasive woman, and even today still shows the same determination, the insistence on getting the results (biopsy or anything else) sooner rather than later, the same glass-half-full pro-active optimism about every challenge. I did not realize how much she taught me about coping until very many years later when I faced a massive challenge of my own—when I lost someone so close to me that my life seemed emptied of content and purpose. I did not know how I was going to get through it (and, Carol, thanks also for pointing out that one never gets over it, one only gets through it). But looking back, I know that I did get through it partly because I saw my mother do it when it was her turn. When the dark side showed up, and piled on the massive challenges, she turned on the floodlights, and fought back, hard, as if there was no alternative, as if there was never any question that she would.
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