Reason number 6,453,983 I love my oncologist: she sends me MyChart messages like this AFTER she called me to tell me the results of my CT scans. She ordered them because during follow up we are “very aggressive” following g up on symptoms. And I’ve had this damn cough for almost five months now.
She told me she thought my cough was still hanging around because the chemo destroyed my esophagus and it takes a long time to heal. It’s not that I didn’t believe her. It’s just that I didn’t believe her. Or at least, I don’t trust the “most likely” explanation because that relies on statistics and we know how I feel about statistics.
I really had convinced myself that it was lung metastasis that was behind the cough. I suppose it’s understandable. It’s my way of trying to prepare myself for the worst. After this past year, why wouldn’t I want to brace myself?
But it’s not. According to my oncologist, my lungs “look perfect.” I see an ENT on Monday to help me with the most likely explanation for my cough: a battered esophagus and acid reflux.
She also talked to me about starting a new drug in January that will take the cure rate for my kind of cancer to 93%. It is no doubt a very deliberate choice on her part to talk about cure rate instead of recurrence rate. I love this about her.
Cancer friends, get you an oncologist who communicates like this. Even when I think I know better, she’s always smarter than me. (I mean, she’s a PhD and MD, so there’s that.) And she says my lungs are perfect. I guess I’ll have to think about believing her.