Monday arrived and it was time to head to Moffitt for my first visit. Based on everything I had read on the web, the visit was going to be several hours long. You were assigned a team including a social worker, numerous doctors and nurses. The plan was to meet with the team and give them my history, slides, and records. The team would review the information given and then proceed with the physical exam. After that was done, we would all meet up again to discuss where we go now.
My father wanted desperately to be at this initial visit but was unable to due to his work schedule. My sister and mother were going to accompany me and we would fill my dad in later. About an hour before the scheduled "lift off", I started getting very nervous and worked up. i started feeling warm and knew my blood pressure was rising. I became very edgy and very quiet. My sister came and picked my mother and I up and away we went.
Moffitt offers free valet parking for everyone which is very nice. So we pulled up to the front door and hopped out. Right inside the door, there was a lovely young lady there to greet us and offer directions which we needed. Moffitt was huge! She told us where to go (and it was not to Hell) and we followed her directions. When we arrived at the women's clinic, I was asked to sign in and sit down. The receptionist was very high strung, was loud, making inappropriate comments towards no one in particular and in general, really upsetting my peace of mind. It was so bad that I almost told her that I needed her to calm down but was afraid it wouldn't come out right so I didn't. The social worker appeared and took the three of us into a room. She gave an overview of what would happen that day, asked questions related to needing physical, mental, and/or emotional help, etc. At one point, she grabbed my arm and suggested I calm down as I was shaking my head so fast as I was listening to her talk. I couldn't help myself - I was a bit hyped up myself and the lady yelling outside did not help. When she finished talking with us, she brought us back out into the waiting room and said that a doctor would be along shortly to take us to another room.
A few minutes later, Dr. Hope arrived. She was this lovely lady who appeared kind and gentle. She was soft spoken and listened well. She lead us to a new consultation room and then explained who she was. She was working under the guidance of Dr. Wenham, who had been selected as my primary doctor at Moffitt. She was already a general doctor but was now learning the ins and outs of gynecological oncology. In the new room, we went over every detail of my health history, my surgery, etc. We must have spent an hour talking. I gave her my reports, records and slides and then she lead me to the examination room. After waiting a while for Dr. Wenham to be free, she ended up doing the exam herself. Then she lead me back to the consultation room to wait for her and Dr. Wenham to review all the information and make some decision.
It seemed like I waited forever but it was probably only a half hour or so. Dr. Wenham, another lovely person, came in and greeted all of us. He looked at me and said he was very sorry I was having to go through this. I told him I was too but here I am - let's get the ball rolling. The he explained that he was going to have to cut me open again to stage the cancer. Basically, when the first surgery was done, my doctor did not know I had cancer and therefore did not remove critical pieces of evidence which would indicate how progressed the cancer was. I asked if it would be the same incision line and the same length. He said yes to both and explained the incision may actually be longer depending upon where they need to go once they get in there. Whenever one is cut open in this fashion, your activities and life in general are put on hold for 6 weeks. One requires daily help just to function. I was at 4 weeks from the previous surgery and now I was looking at being down for 6 more. Yikes! I asked him how soon we could do this and he informed me that my body would have to heal for the full 6 weeks before they could knock me flat on my ass again. I looked at my mother who has a tendency to be over protective of me and told her she had to let me go on a vacation before this next surgery. Anywhere - just let me get away and live just a little bit. She said we could talk about it. Dr. Wenham explained a little bit about ovarian cancer and what he would be looking for once he got inside my body. He needed to remove lymph nodes in the same general area to see if the cancer had spread to them. He was going to "peel" off the top couple layers of the inside walls of the abdominal cavity, remove the omentum - a fatty "bib" which covers the mid section of the intestines, cut open and explore the intestines, scrape my diaphragm and at that point my brain shut off. I am sure he had more plans but I couldn't handle listening to anymore.
When he was finished explaining the plan and answering questions, he and Dr. Hope left and sent Regina - his head nurse in to help us complete more paperwork, review pre-surgery instructions, etc. Regina was the most sterile individual I had ever met in my life up and still is today. She made Ms. Hathaway from the Beverly Hillbillies look like a wild woman. She did her job and did it thoroughly but I was having a hard time relating to her. It was like talking to a bottle of 91% rubbing alcohol. It was too late in the day to actually schedule the surgery as the official scheduler had already gone home so Regina asked me to call her the following day to decide on a day. I told her I would and I did.
When we finished up with Regina, my mother, sister, and I took our own tour of Moffitt. The facility is absolutely awesome. i would encourage everyone to go there once and just walk around. The services they provide are very well thought out and it is obvious that they truly desire to meet the needs of their patients and their families. When we finished our tour, we headed to the pharmacy in the basement to meet up with a family friend who was working there as a pharmacist. We saw him, gave him the run down on the planned surgery, etc. Then we left and headed to Perkins for a bite to eat.
My sister, as I have mentioned in a previous post, is in the end stages of renal (kidney) failure. She is very limited with what she can eat and has to measure the amounts carefully. When we got to Perkins, she picked out her entree but thought the meal would be way more food then she could eat. My mother was feeling very hungry and wanted a larger portion of food. The decided that my mother would order my sister's meal off the senior menu (less food - lower price) and my sister would order my mother's meal. This sounds complicated and it was. And the money wasn't even the issue. I think we just needed something funny and light to focus on. When the meals arrived, the waitress placed my sister's meal in front of my mother since she had ordered it and placed my mother's meal in front of my sister. When the waitress walked away, they switched plates but watched closely for the waitress and switched plates again before she came back so that the correct meal was in front of the person who ordered it. After about the 5th time they had to switch plates, they decided to put both plates in the middle of the table and eat off of them that way. This whole episode got us so tickled and thought we were all going to wet our pants before we got out of there. At some point, we figured that the waitress was "on to us" and were curious about how the bill would look. When the bill finally arrived, we laughed again as we discovered that the waitress had charged us full price for everything - including the senior meal. No, we didn't dare dispute it when we got to the register to pay. We just laughed and handed over the money.
We went home and called dad to fill him in on all of our experiences for the day.
Coming up next - Ovarian Cancer Part 3: the surgery and the aftermath. 36 hours of hell or the night I ran away from Moffitt. This is where it all starts to go downhill.
