​I read a post by Brandon Janous titled Wanna feel loved? Get Cancer. The title is what drew me to the article. It’s very true. I got gifts from people I knew well and people I hardly knew. One friend insisted on bringing dinner which turned into several meals.

Sometimes it feels like an uphill climb when you’re getting a diagnosis.

But I digress, that’s not what inspired me to write this. The article is about being kind to people because you don’t know what is going on in their lives that’s hard. Toward the end he says that they had gone to a doctor for a second opinion about cancer that had spread into his wife’s brain and the second doctor told them it wasn’t in her brain.

How do you deal with such differing diagnoses?

In 2015 Mike had two bone marrow tests to see if they could pin down why he was not making red blood cells. Both times the doctor told us that the bone marrow was hard to get a result from and really didn’t tell them much. I heard him say we were going with a diagnosis but that they weren’t sure of it.

That always made me feel uneasy. After several months and some treatments that didn’t seem to be helping, I pushed Mike to go to MD Anderson where they had the guru in the diagnosis that we had been given.

At MD Anderson he was set up to see a doctor before he would see the guru, they did another bone marrow test and we waited for results. When we got the results, we were told that he didn’t have MDS/MPN Overlap Syndrome, the diagnosis that we had been given previously. He had a mild case of MDS.

He was qualified to see the guru who set him up to be in a study for a chemo treatment he was doing. It was a study to determine the effectiveness of a shorter term of the medication. It meant that we would be going to MD Anderson monthly for the first three months then once every 3 months with monthly treatments somewhere closer between. Mike signed up for it.

Due to the condition in his esophagus and a pending surgery then illness he didn’t go back after the initial three months of treatment.

I don’t know if it was the three months of chemo or the strong antibiotics that they put him on to overcome his acute illness, but he didn’t have a blood transfusion for 17 months after that.

About a week before he died, we had seen the new hematologist at KU Med Center. Mike had started needing transfusions again so we came up with a plan of action to see if we could get him building red blood cells again.

If opinions are so varied it can feel like there is a huge chasm.

I remember at one point that Mike remarked that he went to MD Anderson to appease me. Which brings up another area of communications between the patient and caregiver.

In retrospect I’m not sure that the trips to MD Anderson helped. All I can say is that if you have doctors who give you different diagnoses you need to follow your heart and do what feels right for you. And possibly look for a third opinion.

When the doctors have differing opinions, it can feel like Leather and Lace.

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Onward! The Fallacy of Work/Life Balance