The appointments and why I was having them

April 1, 2010
I had absolutely no time to dwell on what it meant to be living with cancer. I had appointments to keep to prepare for the battle with the marching lobular cells.

First up was the radiation oncologist, Dr Pathare, who explained everything about my cancer all over again and told me he'd see me after I'd finished the chemotherapy. You might think I was getting tired of hearing and talking about it constantly, but to be honest, I found that it was grounding me. The more I talked, the easier it was to accept that I had cancer. Especially when Dr Z and Dr P were just talking about the treatment of a disease. Cancer = Disease ergo Treatment = Cure. A perfect way of looking at it.

As we get older, it is sad that so many of us have lost friends to various forms of cancer. Two days ago, an Italian friend died after a battle with glioblastoma, a particularly deadly brain cancer for which there is no treatment. Peter's boss died of the same thing a couple of years ago. It's rare: 1 in 12,000. But breast cancer is in a different realm entirely. It's a disease and so can be cured. That is my take on the problem.

Val, the vein nurse, was next. She met me in the infusion room, a cozy place with recliners around the walls and a central station for magazines, food, and nurses. This is where I'll come for my chemo infusions. My veins have always worked just fine, but Val was of the opinion that they were too small for the chemo so I'd have to have a port put in. More on that later. Sounds ghastly!

On to the gastroenterologist to book an endoscopy to check throat and stomach (there's a gene connecting lobular carcinoma with stomach cancer... wouldn't you know it!) and a colonoscopy to check the other end. I hope they've improved the flavor of that disgusting stuff you have to drink.

Bone scans are done in the Nuclear Medicine department. No painful shots in the breast this time, just a quick jab in one of my perfectly good veins, then back later for a mid-afternoon nap in their imaging machine. I tried not to dwell on this particular appointment. This was the scariest because I knew exactly what the bone scan was all about. Dr Z wanted to check there was no cancer in my bones. However hard I tried not to worry, I couldn't.

The next day I had the echocardiogram..... like an ultrasound but of your heart. No big deal. The old ticker sounded just fine. But again, what was the point? Well..... chemo can damage the pumping action of the heart so they wanted to check that it was alright before we started. Fair enough.

The dentist was great, inspected and polished me up, and sent me off with special floride toothpastes to prevent tooth and gum decay. Apparently, chemo accelerates all sorts of processes in the body, such as plaque build-up and gum problems, and while you're having chemo you don't want to be seeing the dentist!

Last stop, second opinion at one of the big name New York City hospitals. It seemed like the right thing to do......second opinions sometimes come up with something different, but not in this case. Dr Vadhat, at Weill Cornell, was charming and explained everything to me once more, running the numbers for survival rates for the various treatment options, and the bottom line was that I need aggressive chemo, followed by radiation.

Wrong, one more stop. Back to Dr Z for a final face-to-face. He scribbled out a fistful of prescriptions to be filled stat and set me up for chemo next week......

I still simply cannot believe that I have cancer! It is just too extraordinary.