Talk With Other Survivors
Getting information from other women who are breast cancer survivors can be
very valuable. Also, take comfort in knowing that there are many of us who HAVE
survived this disease ( there are 1.8 million breast cancer survivors in the
United States today). These women can give you candid information about their
own experiences with physicians who provided them care and treatment when they
were diagnosed. It is best to talk with someone who has been treated fairly
recently, though, because treatment modalities change. For example if you spoke
to someone who had a mastectomy 7 years ago she would tell you that she spent
several days in the hospital and suffered with nausea and vomiting and a lot of
pain. Physicians who have chosen to continuously improve care for women battling
breast cancer will make changes in their surgical care to prevent the side
effects that women in the past had to overcome. There are various types of
surgical treatments for breast cancer too and you will find that the experiences
women share with you based on the type of surgery they had will also vary. The
results also vary dramatically between hospitals and individual doctors. Do not
expect the good results from one hospital to translate into similar results at
others.
For example, women having mastectomies or lumpectomies with lymph node
removal and not having reconstruction at the same time should describe an
experience free of severe pain and absence of nausea and vomiting. However the
reported rates of nausea and vomiting in most hospitals in the country exceed
85%. Several years ago, Johns Hopkins pioneered improvements in anesthesia
management and other peri-operative surgical care so that the majority of our
women patients can awaken from this type of surgery and feel relatively normal
from a physical perspective. Our experience at Hopkins since 1995 has been that
women undergoing one of these two procedures without reconstruction feel well
enough to go home the same day. The emotional aspects of this disease and its
treatment cannot be underplayed. We want patients to focus on addressing their
emotional needs as a priority and not have to worry with feeling ill from
surgery. If you find that previous patients you speak to are describing
unpleasant experiences from their surgery, then you might want to get more
information before selecting the same doctor that they chose to see. There are
other important services to ask former patients about, such as the ease and
speed of reaching a health care professional after you go home.
