Last night it seems one of the pipes connecting our water heater froze in our home. What an inconvenience! Stranded I was unable to go to work this morning. Commitments needed to be canceled, meetings moved and rescheduled, I disappointed many but this is important, we have no water in the house and I needed to stay home and wait for someone who understands pipes to come and tell me what is going on. I needed a specialist who could help me evaluate and manage my problem. But I had to change my plans and my day is not going as I had wanted it to.

When my patients are on chemotherapy (chemo), they are at the mercy of the cancer, the side-effects, their blood counts and the specialist. What I am feeling now is an understatement to how it must feel for them to be stranded with a situation that they have no control over. My patients make plans and have lives outside of their cancer that they really do not want to interrupt to be hospitalized and receive chemo. When they come all prepared to be admitted for their chemo, sometimes they do not get what they want. I have many a times delayed a chemo regimen and offset plans that they had. I see how frustrated they become and hear them say “but this means I am going to miss the wedding now”.  This is an aspect of my job I do not enjoy. Most patients receiving chemo are healthy and live active lives in between cycles, and I have stressed that they don’t let the cancer rule their lives, and that they should plan and we will work around their plans. That is easier said than done. Cancer interferes, ruining moments and events and it does not have a schedule.

In delivering chemotherapy to a patient an oncologist will try to stay on track but what patients don’t know is we sometimes have “wiggle room” as I like to call it. We can add a day or subtract a day to get things to accommodate some plans that my patients have. So when they come back for an unanticipated admission or are delayed for things beyond their control I do enjoy giving back “wiggling” their plans back into their lives. The plumber said he would be here at 9am but showed up at 10:30am. The weather is bad today, the roads slick, and cars in ditches, but he came through. He has taken up half my day, but he came, and now the hot water is back. I do strive to ensure that all my patients driving through their bad storms get to where they need to in the end. While the outcome can be as bright as simply fixing a problem to help a patient reach a goal that they wanted – it does make for a better day.

Mo