I posted a dairy about a year ago regarding my wife's breast cancer. The day my world changed. My wife was diagnosed with stage II IDC breast cancer back in 2008. We traveled to Santa Barbara to an alternative medical center for treatment.
We have probably spent $50,000 out of pocket expenses because of the alternative treatments as my insurance would only pay for the medically approved ones. The insurance company did pay for all of the diagnostic testing, which is invaluable even when going the alternative route.
Anyway I will go into my beef with the doctors as this last year has been a challenge to get some testing done. While we were at Issels Medical Center in Santa Barbara my wife had a couple of PET scans done and my insurance picked up most of the tab. PET scans are a whole body scan that pick up cancer tumors.
The challenge has been trying to get another PET scan for my wife. Last summer we asked her family doctor about getting this done and he just kind of ignored the request. Well in July Nancy's blood work came back with a very elevated tumor marker called CA-125 and this same doctor freaked out and said she needs to see the oncologist ASAP. So we scheduled an appointment with the only local oncologist on the island of Kauai. We gathered up all of her records, blood tests, lab tests and PET scan results. When we went to the doctor and talked to her and expressed our desire to have another PET scan. Well we were rebuffed and told that this is not needed because PET scans would not be paid for by the insurance company. We proceeded to tell her that yes my insurance company would pay for it and had done so three previous times. She then said that is is not used for breast cancer. By this time I was totally upset with this doctor. She basically said "why are you here? You are not doing radiation or chemo." We only wanted her to order the PET scan but she refused. She did say that Nancy could get a breast MRI and she ordered it.
My wife then tried to scheduled this MRI in Honolulu and they said that she had to do a mammogram first. Well we had been down that route when she was first diagnosed and she had a mammogram that was inconclusive and she had to get a sonogram instead which did show the original tumor. Queens Hospital told her they would not do this without the mammogram so it was never done because Nancy refused to do another mammogram.
Last month Nancy went back to her doctor and he ordered the MRI again. Well she went through all of the motions to set it up and finally they accepted her for the MRI without having to do the mammogram. We traveled to Oahu and had this done on the 28th of March. She just got a letter from Queens that said there is something not good showing up on the results of the MRI. So now we need to go see her doctor to chart our next course for treatment. I am thinking to myself that this whole MRI thing was a waste because they will now order a PET scan because of the anomaly in the MRI. I just have a real problem with doctors sometimes who will not listen to their patients.
After our previous meeting with the oncologist and she stated that PET scans were not used for breast cancer I decided to google it. Low and behold this is what I came up with go figure it is used and recommended for breast cancer follow up. I just think that we had an established baseline with the prior PET scans and to just get another one to see if the cancer had returned would be the logical route to go, but no we had to go through all of these hoops and not damage doctors egos just to prove that I was right. And I do not think that it should be this hard to get the diagnostic test. I just want the best for my wife in her diagnosis so that she can decide her next move. Sorry about the rant sort of about our doctors.