After a simple shoulder x-ray on January 2, 2007, I learned out of nowhere that something else had shown up in my lung. Ten days later we knew what it was: Stage IV kidney cancer that had spread throughout both lungs.
Suffice it to say that my view of life changed very rapidly. I googled my butt off, but the best information didn’t come from top-ranked medical sites – it came from a community of my peers: people with the same cancer as me, on www.ACOR.org.
In this series I’ll briefly cover the seven topics I wish someone had told me at the outset:
- Cancer is no longer a death sentence.
- Understanding the statistics you read
- Creating a support community of your family and friends
- Online resources - medical information and social resources
- The importance of your attitude and feelings
- Taking care of the caregiver, too
- Advocating for your own care
Now that it’s mostly all over (I’m well again), #7 seems like the top-level lesson. But when I got the news, #1 and #2 were what I needed to hear first. That’s what I’ll write about next.
| August 4th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Thank you for sharing your story, I am looking forward to reading more
| August 4th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
Thanks, Teri. I’d welcome any information you care to share about your particular interest, either here or in private email at epatientdave at comcast dot net.
I’m not *asking* for anything, just saying I’d welcome it. If there’s one thing I learned last year and have kept learning as I began working on transforming healthcare, it’s that each individual human has his/her own remarkable circumstances, which are often worth knowing about, if for no other reason than to help us be amazed at (or even in touch with) others’ lives. And that’s a good thing.
| August 7th, 2008 at 4:08 am
[...] We can easily fix the shoulder, but… [...]
| August 8th, 2008 at 4:01 am
[...] We can easily fix the shoulder, but… [...]