First Meeting with the Oncologist

Oncologist....we were meeting with an "oncologist". Hampshire Hemotology Oncology (HHO) is located in Cooley Dickinson Hospital. It's a long walk from the entrance, up the stairs, down the hallways, to HHO. Follow the signs..."oncology". As we entered their office, it hit me that we were in the "cancer" ward....everyone there is diagnosed with cancer. We have become part of that group. We crossed the threshold.

Our meeting was later in the day and Dr. Bowers told us straight up: "it's cancer", "it's bad", "surgery and radiation is not an option right now"--it would delay chemo and we needed to try to shrink the tumors, "spread to lymph nodes", "spread to the liver"... There it was...

I had done enough reading to put this all together--Stage IV colon cancer, spread to the liver, uncurable, life expectancy of 5 years--low percentage, maybe 2 years if we're lucky...

We asked questions, Dr. Bowers answered them patiently and thoroughly. He described his recommended chemotherapy plan. He wrote it all down for us. As Marty told us "trust your instincts". We liked Dr. Bowers. We felt good about him. He spent a lot of time with us and explained things and answered our questions.

I asked about getting a second opinion. He was concerned about the time this would take. Besides, his reason for not doing surgery first made sense to me and what was as second opinion going to tell us--that Ed didn't have cancer--NOT! If we did nothing, Ed was looking at 1-2 months. That made it pretty clear how "bad" this was. He told us to think about it and give him a call back. He wanted to start chemo the following week.

Oh, and to top things off...Ed is slightly anemic...that is why he has been so tired and has had no energy. So Dr. Bowers immediately put him on iron pills and vitamin C (helps with absorption of the iron). Of course, I don't know why his primary care physician couldn't diagnose this problem--but again, I'm not going there. No sense in wasting energy getting angry at why his primary physician didn't do more. Instead I'm just thankful that we didn't waste anymore than 3-4 weeks waiting on him. If we took his advice Ed would have been dead before he diagnosed anything. Thanking God that we trusted our instincts right away.

So we left there, stopping to get another chest x-ray on our way out for Dr. Bowers, and went out to dinner at Chili's. Talked about how we were going to tell Dan, next steps, what were we going to do. We were going to give this our best shot. We were going to fight this because what other option do we have?