Radiation Oncologist on Board

 

Had a consultation this morning with my Radiation Oncologist(RO).  I like her! She seems to be really on top of things and she gave me very clear descriptions and explanations of everything. 

She uses Tomotherapy which is relatively new.  Wikipedia has a good section on it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomotherapy which includes a photo of the equipment.  Radiation won’t begin until after chemotherapy is complete.

I’m a happy camper today because I feel that I have a very good team of Oncologists to get me through this process.

And the RO’s office was able to light a fire under my surgeon’s RN to get the next surgery scheduled.  This RN who I’ll just call “S” has an attitude problem – she is imperious: seems to feel that she’s the boss in that office and that includes being boss of his patients. When I spoke to S on Friday afternoon and said that I figured that the mastectomy and the port installation could be done at the same time, she told me that “we don’t do that”.  For one thing, the mastectomy will be on my right side and the port will be put on my left side.  I mentioned that my whole body will be available during the surgery.  She then told me that it would be at least Wednesday (day after tomorrow) before she could even talk to the doctor to discuss scheduling the surgery.

When I told the RO that the surgery was not yet scheduled, she got her staff deal with it. 

Surgery will be on Friday (the 13^th) and will include both procedures.

In S’s defense, however, the RO did tell me that many times insurance companies will not pay for both when two procedures are done at once. That floored me!  What kind of lame bureaucrat thinks that it is better to incur cost on two separate occasions when one could be eliminated by performing multiple procedures!!  If there’s any logic there, it escapes me.

Anyway, that’s one more item checked off the to-do list.