Advice

My goal with this whole thing is honestly nothing more than therapy. Writing it all down and pretending that nobody is listening (I know, I haven't been pretending that nobody is listening as of late, but I'm about to again), so that I can get whatever I need to out of my system. I'm not trying to document what this experience is like, what each appointment looks like and complete a whole story of what cancer treatment is like. There are plenty of blogs out there that do that, and I'm grateful. But I don't think I have anything new to contribute here. I'm also not out trying to give future people in my position advice, because so far I've figured out very little. But I did learn an important lesson today, and here it is:

Get the best possible care that you can. 


Even if you think that it's so early that the quality of care is not going to vary very much from clinic to clinic. That's what we thought. I woke up today one hundred miles away (almost exactly) from where we live, running just a few minutes late to our appointment at the University of Michigan. We went there for a second opinion. We did not expect the opinion to be all that different. Mostly we just wanted more information, someone else's perspective on what all of the options in front of us spelled out. When I woke up this morning Sara's tumor was 1.7 centimeters. By the time we left it was over double that.

In addition to the discovery that the tumor was twice the size of what our local cancer treatment facility had told us it was, we were also told that much of the surrounding tissue that we had already been told not to worry about should be worried about. The radiologist was fairly certain that the second biopsy, the one that came back negative, nothing to worry about, was quite possibly just a sample of the wrong site. In fact it likely is something to worry about.

This all seems like it might be bad news, but it's not. We'd rather know all of this now, before she actually undergoes surgery, before we start treatment, before we think we're in the clear when we're only halfway out of the woods. Because honestly, if we never have to go through this again, that would be really, really ideal. Seriously. Never. Again.

And we left the longest day of appointments today not only better informed, but with a much higher confidence that we'll be getting the right treatment, that our odds of having to go through this ever again will be as low as we can get them, and that we're in good hands. What a difference a little bit more experience makes. So the point, the moral here, isn't necessarily that you should always get a second opinion (I don't think we would bother if we had started here), but rather that you should seek the best possible care that you can get. While I'm sure that this is true of other things in addition to cancer, it is especially true of cancer.

Alright, on to other news:

I'm ready for bed. Goodnight.