Breast Cancer blog | A trek, a schlep. One step forward, two back
I made a two-hour schlep to the cancer centre at the hospital in the city (don’t get me started with the perils of the public transportation system here).
Washington is new to me. I’ve been suburb-bound as I’ve settled into a new life and routine. I’ve been so busy moving forward that, for a while, I literally forgot that I had unfinished business – find a new cancer doctor, a new breast surgeon, a new medical team because I’m supposed to follow up.
I am going with a sigh and out of a sense of obligation. It was one of the moments when I wished that my medical adventure was something more straightforward like a broken bone or maybe tonsillitis or better yet the flu. Cancer doesn’t end with a radiation round; it sits in the background sometimes at a great distance, other times closer.
After taking the train and shuttle to the hospital I was all but exhausted, and waxed nostalgically on Hong Kong’s swift and stellar public transportation system. I miss the Queen Mary.
The white coat was a Chinese woman – nerdy and very technical. She flipped quietly through the mini-library of files I had hauled there. And then she finally broke the silence by saying, “There are a lot of things in Chinese here.” I wracked my brain, panicked. Did she have someone else’s records? “The reports are in English,” I said. Perhaps feeling a bit threatened, she reasserted her authority and said, “Oh maybe it’s the receipts in there.” Indeed I had kept every receipt, including those for lunch trips to Delifrance and Café de Coral.
She was petite and pretty, but had the social skills of a gorilla. I came for a follow-up. Instead she looked at the records and said, “It’s strange that with non-invasive cancer they gave you the details of the HER 2 of the tumour. In this country, we don’t include those numbers for non-invasive cancer, and the number for that looks pretty high, not great.” Was it the word “strange” that threw my thoughts out of whack, or that I felt sucker-punched? I felt a great need now to defend my treatment.
“It’s odd that they don’t include that information in this country,” I said. “So if I got treated here, I wouldn’t have even had those in the report.”