My first day of the second week here at Waverly Oncology was fairly relaxed. At the clinic, every Monday the doctors and PA’s come together for a meeting in the morning so I didn’t have to come in till much later. When I arrived, I saw the first patient who was probably the youngest cancer patient I have seen so far (24). She was American but had lived in South Korea for a bit. When she found out she had a tumor on her left breast and that is showed positive for cancer, she returned to the U.S. with her husband. Her tumor had initially been recorded to be about 3cm by 3cm but fortunately it had reduced to around 2cm by 2cm. Her husband (who is South Korean and struggles a bit with English) was so excited by this reduction, he dabbed; thankfully some humor was brought to the situation. It was still hard to watch such a young woman go through a change which will affect the rest of her life. Mrs. Blumenthal explained her surgical options which would be necessary if her tumor didn’t reduce in size anymore. Initially, the patient had a tough time grasping the idea of a lumpectomy versus a mastectomy. She also wasn’t too thrilled about other lifestyle changes she had to make. Regardless, she was thankful that there was some kind of progress in terms of her cancer.
After this patient, I visited a couple other older patients with Mrs. Blumenthal. I had some downtime towards the end of the day so I did some research on the kind of cancer AR has so that I can be somewhat familiarized with the subject matter when I attend the medical conference at REX Cancer Center tomorrow morning with Dr. Graham.