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Entry-Level Cancer: My First Six Months in the Club That No One Wants to Join
You cannot call it gallows humor if you survive (however long that may be doesn't really matter). Cancer is terrifying stuff, but having survived it since 2007, I've earned the right to poke fun at this ghastly affliction in this sad/happy/gross/wide-open and honest field guide to all the emotions and medical procedures that you (the patient, loved one, family member) can expect to go through. I take the hit of traversing the great unknown so you can understand what to expect from the comfort of your chair. Good luck in whatever comes your way, I'm cheering for you! DB
199 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 26, 2014
44 people are currently reading
30 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 23, 2020
Humorous take on one of life's most frightening experiences.
May 20, 2021
Enjoyed reading his humorous take on his cancer journey. Could have done without all the talk about fixing his old corvette. Boring!
October 1, 2022
I've always heard that the way to wipe the smile off a lawyer's face is to tell him that his new client is an engineer. An engineer deals in logic (his own, of course) and his attorney must try to convince him that the judge and opposing council may not be any more impressed with the "logic" of him having a girlfriend than his soon-to-be-ex-wife was.
Judging by this man's experiences, oncologists seem very tolerant of the engineer's ingrained habit of challenging everything. They not only fully answer his many questions and respond to his objections patiently, they show him all the equipment and carefully explain the computer programming that runs it. In short, they treat him with the courtesy that doctors normally reserve for each other. Do doctors consider engineers to be their "equals?" Do specialists think of themselves as "engineers?" If so, is this why many of us find the modern medical system so intimidating and frustrating?
Enough of my nattering. The author lives in Houston and is an engineer married to another engineer, with one daughter at Rice University and a second in high school. He runs his own consulting firm, is a car freak, and prides himself on his intensive exercise regime, his fitness-not-fatness, and his perfect health. He admits to being a Type-A and that this has caused some personal problems, but has it all under control now that he's self-employed and doesn't have to commute. The family has recently moved into a McMansion (his word, not mine) which sits on a golf course and has two shower heads in the master bathroom. Then he finds a lump in his armpit.
"Lumpy" turns out to be not just cancerous, but a rare type of cancer - basal cell, but with some squamous cell characteristics. The cancer is "metastatic." In other words, it came from some other location and so a herd of specialists is called in to determine the source. After being scoped and scanned and biopsied in numerous offices, there's still no answer. The recommendation is radiation and chemotherapy.
Here things get complicated. Houston is the home of the world-famous M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and he's being treated at another cancer center. The Big Man is highly respected in the medical world for his ground-breaking work in radiological cancer treatment but nobody outside his field has ever heard of him and they've ALL heard of M.D. Anderson.
The author's family, in-laws, friends, and co-workers (all of whom sound as tightly wound as he is) are appalled. They want to be able to tell everyone that their son-brother-whatever is being treated at MDA because it's the best and they're worth it. All of this in spite of the fact that his father-in-law died a slow, miserable death while being treated for lung cancer at MDA. Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.
For a while, it's no better than even money whether he can afford to be treated ANYWHERE. His wife's insurance kicks in after the $3,000 deductible and pays 80%. The remaining 20% comes out of his pocket until it reaches the $8,000 limit. The cancer center billing office has an interesting suggestion. "You could get better insurance."
One of his car collection has to be sold to cover the bill and he drives himself to treatments. His wife can't risk losing her job and their insurance. The good life doesn't allow for potholes in the road and this family with two above-average incomes lives as much on the edge as one headed by a single parent making minimum wage. They just have nicer stuff to lose.
Anyway, he WAS treated and survived and went back to his cars and his exercise and enjoys it all more now because he knows how easily he could lose it. I skipped the parts about Tae Kwan Do and corvettes, neither of which interests me. However, it's well written and frequently funny and sometimes hilarious and the part about the M.D. Anderson Center was fascinating. It's that great rarity - a cancer survivor story written from a male perspective. We need more of those. I learned a lot from this book.
Judging by this man's experiences, oncologists seem very tolerant of the engineer's ingrained habit of challenging everything. They not only fully answer his many questions and respond to his objections patiently, they show him all the equipment and carefully explain the computer programming that runs it. In short, they treat him with the courtesy that doctors normally reserve for each other. Do doctors consider engineers to be their "equals?" Do specialists think of themselves as "engineers?" If so, is this why many of us find the modern medical system so intimidating and frustrating?
Enough of my nattering. The author lives in Houston and is an engineer married to another engineer, with one daughter at Rice University and a second in high school. He runs his own consulting firm, is a car freak, and prides himself on his intensive exercise regime, his fitness-not-fatness, and his perfect health. He admits to being a Type-A and that this has caused some personal problems, but has it all under control now that he's self-employed and doesn't have to commute. The family has recently moved into a McMansion (his word, not mine) which sits on a golf course and has two shower heads in the master bathroom. Then he finds a lump in his armpit.
"Lumpy" turns out to be not just cancerous, but a rare type of cancer - basal cell, but with some squamous cell characteristics. The cancer is "metastatic." In other words, it came from some other location and so a herd of specialists is called in to determine the source. After being scoped and scanned and biopsied in numerous offices, there's still no answer. The recommendation is radiation and chemotherapy.
Here things get complicated. Houston is the home of the world-famous M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and he's being treated at another cancer center. The Big Man is highly respected in the medical world for his ground-breaking work in radiological cancer treatment but nobody outside his field has ever heard of him and they've ALL heard of M.D. Anderson.
The author's family, in-laws, friends, and co-workers (all of whom sound as tightly wound as he is) are appalled. They want to be able to tell everyone that their son-brother-whatever is being treated at MDA because it's the best and they're worth it. All of this in spite of the fact that his father-in-law died a slow, miserable death while being treated for lung cancer at MDA. Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.
For a while, it's no better than even money whether he can afford to be treated ANYWHERE. His wife's insurance kicks in after the $3,000 deductible and pays 80%. The remaining 20% comes out of his pocket until it reaches the $8,000 limit. The cancer center billing office has an interesting suggestion. "You could get better insurance."
One of his car collection has to be sold to cover the bill and he drives himself to treatments. His wife can't risk losing her job and their insurance. The good life doesn't allow for potholes in the road and this family with two above-average incomes lives as much on the edge as one headed by a single parent making minimum wage. They just have nicer stuff to lose.
Anyway, he WAS treated and survived and went back to his cars and his exercise and enjoys it all more now because he knows how easily he could lose it. I skipped the parts about Tae Kwan Do and corvettes, neither of which interests me. However, it's well written and frequently funny and sometimes hilarious and the part about the M.D. Anderson Center was fascinating. It's that great rarity - a cancer survivor story written from a male perspective. We need more of those. I learned a lot from this book.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews