Sylvia's Journal

I have now completed all the consultations and collected the expert opinions of the members of my care team. It does not quite feel like a team in my experience of what teamness is all about. It seems more like a collection of busy individual specialists who can all open my dossier from their computer and see the same data and talk about me from time to time. Apparently this ‘team’ met in mid March, after the lumpectomy, presumably on a Zoom call, and came to the unanimous conclusion that radiation was called for. Unfortunately, the medical oncologist we consulted earlier this week, had not been in on that conversations about my situation and had his doubts about the conclusion, leaving me with doubts.

I was able to get a phone consult on short notice – the radiation treatment starts next week, so that was important – with the radiation oncologist and laid out my doubts in the form of questions which she answered to my satisfaction. It’s been a bit of whiplash, yes to radiation, no to hormone therapy, no to radiation, yes to hormone treatment, or yes or no to both. It is all about probabilities, calculations that are difficult to make by someone who is not up to date on the research and remembers nothing about the Intro to Probability Statistics course that I took some 50 years ago. As I am wading into this very complex universe of the cancer cell, I am told about probabilities of recurrence. It may be local recurrence, a cancer cell left in the breast that starts to multiply, and/or a different cancer that develops spontaneously, like my breast cancer did for who knows what reason, elsewhere in my body. The radiation would take care of missed cancer cells in my left breast and the hormone treatment would make sure that any similar type of cancer would not receive sustenance any longer from certain hormones.

I have found, and in one case been told, that everyone stays in his or her lane: the breast surgeon cuts, the radiation oncologist radiates and the medical oncologist prescribes pills or infusions. Sometimes the lanes ran in parallel and sometimes one or two lanes veer off. So here I stand, looking ahead. I think it is going to be parallel roads for the next month until the radiation is done and that road veers off; after that I will stay on the hormone road for many years to come, which hormone is yet to be determined, that too is mighty difficult to decide.