Venting and raving....a combination of too much 'Net surfing and another OVCA obit in this morning's

From the British Journal of Medicine, 2003:

The goal of second-line therapy in ovarian cancer is essentially palliative, and therefore factors such as patient convenience and comfort, toxicity profile and cost are primary concerns in drug selection in this setting (Gadducci et al, 2001). Accordingly, health-related quality of life (QOL) assessment has become increasingly important in gynaecological oncology (Pignata et al, 2001). For this reason, effective treatment options that do not compromise tolerability or patients' convenience are desirable.

I have to wonder how many patients got to weigh in on this. How many of you are concerned about the "convenience" of your Cancer treatments? No, thanks, I don't want to come in next week for my chemo treatment; it's not CONVENIENT. I have an appointment at the hairdresser's to get my head shaved and then I have to make a run to the helath food store, so I can stock up on mushrooms and asparagus. How does a week from next Thursday sound? Will that work for you guys? Yeah....right.

As for the very first sentence, that's news to me, too. I have never before read that anything after the first recurrence becomes "palliative" care. Tell that to the woman I know who has done NINE rounds of chemo, over an 11 year period, and is far, far from checking herself into Hospice. No wonder women get depressed at every turn with this disease.

I guess it's a good thing that all this information is available on the Internet. In fact, I am truly glad it is there. I am of the mind that information is power, and more information means more ammunition, more choices, and ultimately leads to better decisions. But it's still a big bummer to my delicate psyche, which is already on Cancer overload. Pretty soon those guys in the nice white jackets are going to come for me, I swear. Oh, wait.....they already have. No, false alarm. That was just the lab tech, come to draw more blood. And she didn't even bother to ask if it was convenient. What a rude b*&%h.



Carlene