Julia Louis-Dreyfus Has Breast Cancer..

[Ms. Toad]

29. I fired the medical team that was 10 minutes (if I took the long route) from my office

The local team messed up pretty much every appointment they made for me. They would tell me they scheduled me back-to-back for two appointments so I could just walk up the stairs from one to the other. Trouble is the two appointments were 45 miles apart, which I only found out when one of them called the day ahead to confirm my appointment. It was the middle of finals week, and I had very carefully scheduled my appointments to accommodate student meetings, to make sure students had access for last minute questions about the next day's exam, and driving 45 minutes to an appointment that was supposed to be 10 minutes away did not sit well with me.

In another instance they insisted on making my appointments for me, then didn't bother to tell me critical information like the facility fee that would be charged on top of my copayment (Information I would have gotten if I had spoken with them myself - that I only found out after arriving for the appointment, no one could tell me how much it was or if my insurance covered it, and since the idiot double-booked things to get me in, if I didn't take the appointment (and pay the fee no matter what it was) it would have been another month before I could get back in). I was wrestling with a relatively new diabetes diagnosis, that is extremely sensitive to emotional distress - and my blood sugar was elevating more in response to the stress than to anything I ate.

It was like that for every single appointment - and if you are familiar with the early states of cancer triage- you know there are appointments every other day with a half dozen doctors from imaging to surgery. That's a lot of appointments and unnecessary aggravation when they are all screwed up.

The icing on the cake was when i took my family to a support group in the doctor's office (where everyone was worshippping the doctor and facility). I shared my experience, which was not wonderful, and their response caused my daughter to say as we left, "They really don't care if you come here or not, do they?)

When I'm battling cancer & trying to meet my heaviest student demand all year, I don't need to be aggravated every single time I have to communicate with my care team.

I switched to my mother's doctor. My mother has had two different bouts with breast cancer (a new primary cancer, not a metastasis from the first) - I trust my mother's doctor so I decided to accept the longer drive for treatment. Once the surgeon was roughly an hour away, I also swithced the medical and radiological oncologists so the entire team was within the same building and used to working with each other. The only one that was a significant hassle was the radiology, since that was a daily round trip for 17 weekdays days in a row.

(After I switched, the new team actually found two new suspicious spots on the films that the team I fired had taken and declared clean . . . they ultimately turned out to be nothing, but we delayed surgery for two additional biopsies so that I could avoid waking up surprised to find to a complete mastectomy, rather than the partial one I had planned (the suspicious spots were too far away from teh primary tumor to leave anything to work with). Another reason I'm glad I fired the first team. Based on the hospital system, I'm not surprised it was so chaotic - it has that reputation. But based on the surgeon's own recent breast cancer diagnosis, I'm appalled that she thinks what they offered was satisfactory care.)