Doctors and Paperwork

I have spent most of the last 48 hours filling out paperwork and seeing doctors. (If you are one of the lucky relatives who got a call or e-mail from me, you know it's true!)

I believe I ended up with close to 20 pages of information for City of Hope and more than 10 for the plastic surgeon. Plus, before those appointments I also went for a good old fashioned teeth cleaning. Nothing like a little normalcy!

First, we absolutely loved the plastic surgeon. He was a world of difference from the first and he won us both over with both his kindness and professionalism, then with his fine work. We feel really great about him. He is from Bombay originally and he even spoke some Bengali to me! What more could we ask for? Well, skill, I suppose--and he has that in spades, so we are content. Our medical group now needs to approve the referral--we went before the referral was complete. This may take time, but we are confident it will go through.

Today I went to City of Hope. What a place! They truly are a well-oiled machine and operate with impressive efficiency. Volunteers walk you from check-in station to check-in station and I even got a tour and a free pen! Their women's health center is beautiful.

It was not without sadness. When I arrived, a woman in the waiting area was on the verge of a breakdown over her genetic testing results. I'm sure it is a hospital of much grief and anxiety. But it was interesting to see how the people there handled it and I happened to see the woman again twenty minutes later and she was hugging one of the staff and smiling and seemed much calmer, though she was still teary-eyed.

I spent about an hour with a geneticist (I guess that's what you'd call her) and then some time with a physician from the genetics department. I donated a portion of my tumor and an extra vial of blood to their research, so that felt good (don't worry, they get the tumor from the lab on their own, it's not like I carried it there!). I even signed something that said if they find out ten or twenty years from now what caused my cancer, they should call me to tell me--I thought that was a funny thing to sign, but I'm glad to know the possibility is there.

They believe there is more than a 10% chance that my cancer was genetic, and they test anyone with more than a 5% chance. So they had already requested approval from my insurance company to do the test before I even got there. Hurray! It's unusual for breast cancer to be genetic, but because of my age and some family history they wanted to test me. Which, really, was exactly what I hoped to accomplish today.

I found out a few interesting things as well, such as that when women my age do get cancer, they don't typically get the kind I had. My cancer was estrogen and progesterone positive, which is typical of a lifetime of estrogen exposure--not typical in a 34 year old, even a 34 year old with breast cancer. So that was interesting to discover.

Since I'll be the first in my family to be tested for the BRCA1 and 2 mutations, finding the chromosomes and looking for mutations takes time. They are running two tests and it will take 3 to 5 weeks to get results.

The family history that I took time to gather (thank you to my grandmas, my aunties, siblings and my parents) will be entered into the research database. I signed forms that make it private to their research--the records cannot be accessed by insurance companies or any other party besides the scientists and researchers at City of Hope. So, even being able to give them that much family history (given how much cancer is in our history) was a help to their cause. They thanked me several times for being so thorough on the short notice I had.

So it has been an incredibly exhausting, but good couple of days. Thanks for your prayers and encouragement and for thinking of me.