Friday, October 29, 2010

Doctors, Options, Health after Cancer

    I guess I'm not any bigger a fan of going to the doctor than anybody else. But sometimes it's necessary. After you've had an operation, after you've had some
serious health problems (from broken bones to cancer), you have to do followup.And followups aren't the worse thing in the world, especially if you come prepared in advance with some questions.
    So I went to my doctor, oncologist to be specific, to do a "followup" and talk about ideas I had for different options. And for some reason a storm fell on the town, tossing old pine needles all over the parking lot. The lady who came in just after me was all worried about her just washed car. I'd had mine washed the other day and somehow didn't see the problem with the big trees beyond her parking space. But in a few minutes the wind whipped up hundreds of yellowing pine needles, splattering them unexpectedly on her  car and mine.
    Was this a sign of things to come? I was already a bit anxious about this visit as I was going to propose something different: alternative therapy. Those two words are an anathema to some doctors, who believe a patient wanting other options in treatment is some nutty crackpot. But I'd done a fair amount of research since learning I had breast cancer and done the "traditional" treatments, treatments that put me in the hospital and made me want to quit the whole dang business.
    But you can't trade bodies (at one point I said this to my spouse) and ignore health problems. You have to address them at some point or other, whether you like it or not. So I told the doc I had a wonderful assortment of side effects from taking this pill, Femara, and wanted to see about alternative therapy. His response was that Somers' book Knockout was basically anecdotal and that his research on women surviving cancer on "his pill" was backed up by studies. True, but at the cost of making me as
old inside as my mother, giving me her immune system and ultimately making me
vulnerable?
   Well -- surprisingly, he said we should do a bone density scan (back soreness being one of my complaints) and actually look into alternate therapies. What a surprise!