In one of those oddities of surviving through cancer, the good news is that we are preparing for Christina to have surgery on Wednesday and, compared with all the breast cancer surgery options there are, it’s going to be relatively mild surgery.
But what an unnecessarily stressful month it’s been getting to this place.
The thing is, based on everything the oncologist had seen about Christina’s tumor – particularly the fact that it responded so well to the chemotherapy and has essentially disappeared – the preference on all sides was to have a lumpectomy. The only hang-up was that we didn’t know if Christina had only had a little bad luck (in terms of getting a tumor) or if she had gotten a supersized case of bad luck, which would have meant she had a genetic tendency towards cancer. Had that been the case, we would be spending this weekend pondering preventive mastectomy, hysterectomy and more.
But you can’t know what kind of luck you’re having until you get a genetic test. As luck would have it, the place to get that kind of test is at the main campus of the hospital where Colin got most of his medical care. Cue the medical bureaucracy follies!
It took weeks for Christina to sort out the scheduling and get the documents she needed to get her insurance to approve the test. In the end, her current oncologist had to call them and light a fire under them so that there was some chance of the genetic testing being completed about the same time the chemotherapy finished.
She had the test in early March. From the start, we were told it would take about a month to get the results, which was fine, because Christina had her final chemotherapy in mid-April. A side note: She handled all the chemo like a trooper. A couple of times she apologized to me about feeling wiped out after the chemo, when all I could do is stand there in amazement that she wasn’t throwing up lunches from 8th grade. We had the appointment to get the test results on April 2.
Then, right before Easter, they called to say that they had to push the test results appointment back to April 12. That was a problem, because the surgery was scheduled for April 17 and if we were upgrading from a lumpectomy to a larger set of removals … well, that wasn’t a ton of time to contemplate the ramifications and reorganize the surgery. Christina called to see if she could get things moving faster. All she got was the information that the test results were actually already back at the hospital … they were just going to need a couple of weeks to type it all up.
People, when the doctor gave us the news yesterday that there was no genetic tendency, I was glared. But I also glared at that report in the doctor’s hand the whole time, because it was only one and one-quarter pages. As I type this blog, my space bar is glitchy, so I have full sympathy for people who can’t type fast. But needing that much time to type out less than a page a half is something like a two-word-a-day typing speed. It makes me really wonder if I picked the right career path, with all the fast typing you need to do on deadline as a reporter.
In the end, it will be just one more of those stupid hospital stories you tell. I was talking to a friend recently whose daughter missed a surgery appointment because, even though the surgery was scheduled, she wasn’t registered for it. Given that she was hospitalized at the time, you’d think the Bureaucracy Fairies could have handled it, but no, her Dad needed to make a special appointment to register her for surgery so the doctors could fix her broken arm. He was so annoyed, I told him about the hospital clerk who told me about her bad day, as she apparently tried to commiserate with me after I told her I had just found out an hour ago that my son had a brain tumor. I know most of the people in hospitals want to help … but sometimes they just fail.
Anyways, we’re happy. Or happier than we might have been. Given how long it took to get these results, we’ve spent the last few weeks gaming a lot of worst-case scenarios. You kind of have no choice but to do so after what we went through with Colin. But it’s nice that, for once, we can keep all of those scenarios on the shelf and go with the least-bad option. It’s still surgery and Christina still has to go through cancer and all the treatments. But at least it’s not the worst option.
Think of us on Wednesday.
This had gone to my spam so just read it today. Hoping Christina’s surgery went well.