This post has been shared by the AdvoConnection Blog. It was written with a patient-client audience in mind, but might be useful to you, too.
It is provided so you can find it in a search here at myAPHA.org, but you’ll need to link to the original post to read it in its entirety. Find the link to that post at the end of the excerpt.
Making Smart Medical Decisions After Devastating News
Jane M., a smart, savvy, well-liked, and well-respected business woman who supervises 100+ people at work, and who juggles her family’s needs as well as her own, day in, and day out – has just been diagnosed with breast cancer. She is devastated. Overwhelmed. Frightened. Frustrated. Life has just taken a left turn and for the first time in her life, she can’t seem to cope. Will she die? She can’t focus at work. Will her insurance cover what she needs or leave her family’s finances in shambles? Will she die? She forgot to pick her son up from soccer practice. Will she lose all her hair in chemo? Will she die? How will she manage work? She daydreams. Will she die and leave her husband and kids behind? She can’t sleep. Will she ever meet her grandchildren? She just can’t seem to pull her act together or think in a straight line anymore. Life is jumbled. She feels incapable of making a decision in any of the smart and savvy ways she has done so all her life. And her husband can’t seem to help – not because he doesn’t want to, but because he is as emotionally strung out as she is. To anyone who has ever been diagnosed with something so dire as cancer (or whose loved one has heard a difficult diagnosis) this scenario will ring true. I’ve been there. I know. The situation is often exacerbated by medical providers who may have different agendas from their patients. Doctors who want to treat their patients to keep them alive, yes. But also, if they make the “right” recommendations, they can make lots of money, too. Smart patients ask – what defines “right”? Right for whom? What alternatives are there? And then, most importantly, what is right for ME? Two women, both diagnosed with breast cancer, may or may not choose the same “right” path forward. Jane is 40 years old with a huge life in front of her – promotions, raises, grandkids, and much more. “Right” for Jane may mean throwing everything the medical literature deems to be successful for extending life at any cost (health or money.) But what if Jane was 75 years old? “Right” might mean something very different, including the possibility of choosing no treatment at all. But what we know about the healthcare system means that a 75-year old woman might…