Six years: Moving onto two hands

Well.  To say this past year was challenging would be an understatement.  The upside of the bad year was it was completely non-health related.  I was laid off about a year ago and while I've had some contract gigs here and there, I continue to search for a new permanent job.  Around the time I was laid off, we broke ground on expanding our house.  The four of us were living in the basement.  All in all, it was worth it and I LOVE our remodeled home, but it was a stressful process.

Needless to say, I was ready for 2018 to be over.  We adopted a dog in mid-January of this year, because why not?  A friend recently said to me, "you like chaos in your life, don't you?"  Perhaps I do.  It's like having a toddler again.  Except he'll never get beyond his toddler years.

My health is still fine.  I continue to feel old and achy from my aromatase inhibitors, but as long as I do my stretches religiously, I'm usually pretty good.  That being said, I don't think I'll ever be my old self.

A Friend's Diagnosis
Out of nowhere a few weeks ago, somebody close to me got her own cancer diagnosis.  Unlike me, she's private and doesn't want the world to know, so I'm respecting her privacy as best as I possibly can.  But watching her journey these past few weeks has brought up a lot of anger.  Anger at our healthcare system and anger at cancer.

I originally wrote out a whole long post about this, but it was becoming a stream of consciousness more than anything else that was going to make zero sense to anyone but me.  I'll save you the reading time and summarize my friend's experience as such:

• Dana Farber's clinicians get an F in patient care.  Long story short, my friend's first meeting with her oncologist and surgeon was a disaster.  Her team disagreed with each other on next steps and there didn't seem to be a sense of urgency on getting her cancer staged so a treatment plan could be created.
• Dana Farber's Patient Advocacy team is a joke.  At a DF employee's recommendation, I called Patient Advocacy on my friend's behalf to share her experience.  The woman I spoke to didn't listen to a word I said and I ended up in tears at the end of the call.

When I received my diagnosis from my PCP the evening of April 3, 2013, I was at Beth Israel by mid-morning the next day.  I met with my onc and surgeon together.  It was an exhausting and overwhelming day, but BI organized everything on my behalf.  My onc and breast surgeon were kind and calm (well, not my plastic surgeon, who's different from the breast surgeon.  He was and always will be a sociopath).  As long as that day was, I felt like I left with a solid plan of what the next steps were.  I naively thought this experience happened to anyone with a cancer diagnosis.  Maybe it was my age at the time of my diagnosis, but everyone deserves to be treated like that no matter how old they are.

In the interest of full-disclosure, I also had a negative experience at DF when I went there for a second opinion, so going back there for a clinical visit brought back a lot for me. But that was six years ago and she'd be dealing with different docs and this is where she wanted to go.  Fine, I was fully supportive.  I was mortified on my friend's behalf about her terrible day at DF.  Thankfully when I spoke to my friend the following day, she was in agreement and knew she deserved better.  She has a second opinion scheduled at BI for later this week. Not as quickly as I'd hoped, but part of that is driven by them wanting her to get some additional tests done so they can begin staging her cancer.  At the very least, they are making her feel like a person and not a widget.  She's had nothing but great things to say to me about how professional the staff at BI has been thus far.  (Thankfully, since she went at my behest.)

I'm Pissed
What can I say--I'm pissed.  I'm pissed that cancer has its talons in somebody else.  I don't know what the future holds for my friend right now, but she's focused on taking things one day at a time. I'm pissed that she was treated so poorly but I'm hoping her future care will be better. 

Do you enjoy these check-ins from me?  They feel rather narcissistic at this point if I'm being honest.  And yet I keep writing them.