Joan, You Have To Have Chemo

Thank goodness I take notes during these doctor's appointments because those words "Joan, you have to have Chemo" keep ringing in my ears.

Joan and I went to her long anticipated second opinion today and let me tell you it was brutal. We went hoping to validate what we had heard from our terrific Oncologist Dr. Stephanie Capone and to some extent we did get that validation. However, Dr. Maria Flores has a very different way of looking at things and boy did we get a different view into our futures today. In life I guess it is always how you look at things.

Of course we arrived way to early as we usually do to this appointment but we were ushered in pretty quickly when a guy who must have ridden his skateboard to work shouted "Jo Ann!" into the waiting area. We knew he meant Joan (how do you get Jo Anne out of J-O-A-N? Joan asked. Who can answer such things?). Anyway, after a lying bastard scale and blood pressure check we waited for Dr. Flores.

Dr. Flores is not a large woman. But she exploded into the room like the Tasmanian Devil.

JO ANN?

Sure, that's me...

Dr. Flores was also unimaginably loud for the tiny cinder block room we were sitting in. Her shouts of welcome made us flinch in the tiny room and the she proceeding to examine JOAN. She mashed all the favorite lymph node hang outs in her neck, arm pits and groin area and threw herself into a chair. That is when everything quit being so funny.

Dr. Flores tells us that most of what we know about Folicular Lymphoma is correct. It grows slowly (good news!) but can kill you and is incurable (dang...). But her advice was completely different that Dr. Capone. Where Dr. Capone wants to wait because chemo is pretty destructive to your body, Dr Flores wants Joan to start chemo soon. Her reasoning is that everybody who gets this type of Lymphoma must have chemo and to wait until she is fifty will only add the further inconveniences of arthritis and other maladies of aging.

Worse still, Dr. Flores continued to ask probing questions about Joan's symptoms. She determined that Joan has not only stage three cancer, but a worse kind of stage three (3B) because of her night sweats. She has had the night sweats for a couple of years and those dramatic up swings in body temperature are a really bad sign for cancer patients. To Maria Flores, once that happens, you get chemo, no question about it.

Some new things about her Lymphoma that we learned were that the indolent period of her Lymphoma is usually about 5 - 10 years. We think Joan had this thing for a couple of years before we finally had it diagnosed. So she has a couple of years left easy before the average person would begin to feel the effects of the disease. The other news is that once she has the chemo if it is effective (over 90% of the patients have the cancer completely removed when the therapy is complete) she can look forward to a 5 - 10 year period of remission. Unfortunately this type of cancer is also the type that will frequently turn into a more aggressive cancer like Liver or Lung cancer. So with all of this information Joan knows that she will have to get chemo therapy and although some of the timing may be in her hands, ultimately she will be strapped to a chair for hours per day and have poisons pumped into her body.

So we left the office and had a beer.

We have scheduled another appointment with Dr Capone to further discuss these new revelations and get a game plan for our next course of action. Until then we are still in a period of constant reevaluation of our out look on this disease and it's impact on Joan. And our view on the issue is constantly changing. I guess it really is all about how you look at things.

Looks half full to us.