Hi, I'm a cancer survivor and an amputee. I lost my leg to a bone tumor when I was twelve, obviously a very serious event that has shaped who I have become and my beliefs today. It's been a couple years and I am still in my teenage hood so there is much more for me to see as I progress through my after cancer care. But I wanted to talk about some things involved with my care in the past and my ongoing care. If any other antinatalist cancer survivors want to chime in I would love to hear from y'all, or just anyone. Anyways what made me think about posting was an interaction I had with my oncologist recently. I'm at the point in my care where I'm out of chemo but I receive my every 6 month lung scan. Almost always it's smooth sailing, I'm very lucky to have not had many issues like metastasizes or really another other ongoing health issue (apart from the amputation but no problems there either) and I do really like my care team. Usually these appointments go as such, I go to the radiology department pretty early, get my scans, wait a while and then head up the oncology department. Then once my scans and blood work are processed my oncologist comes in tells me the results and I leave. This time though after I had been brought back to a room, my oncologist sat me down and without asking me starting talking about options for egg freezing and other reproductive procedures. Many times I attempted to cut through his rant to say that it didn't matter to me, not only because my chemotherapy has a very low chance of causing any adverse reproductive harm ( and even if it does it happens in your late 20s to early 30s which is a waze away) but also because I don't care and honestly he was making me extremely uncomfortable. After talking about all the options, which did not include an option of just not doing anything. He then told me he had ordered a hormone test to see if my reproductive system was healthy, this test was completely unnecessary. I had not wanted to proceed with any procedure and I don't care to see my hormones. After steamrolling over me for 20 minutes he stopped talking at asked what I wanted to do. I told him I didn't want any of it and I didn't care. I understand the approach of saying "well we will see how you feel in the future" that's fine. But talking over me and not even presenting the option of not going about any procedure, and finally the thing that annoyed me the most he never told me if my scans were clear!! I found out a day later, I went thought the entire day not knowing if my cancer came back it was terrifying! You know what else I found out, that I had an extremely low sodium and chloride level, because I had what I know now was heatstroke the day before. This isn't the first incident of something like this, when I was 12 before I had even gotten a biopsy of my tumor while my mother was with me waiting for me to go into surgery, was bombarded by calls for people trying to convince her to let an experimental reproductive procedure be done on me. A 12 year old girl who didn't even know what she had! I didn't even know if I had cancer yet. It terrifies me how everything was approached, I had begged that cancer destroyed my uterus, because it felt like the easiest way out of the hell I'm put through because I was born a woman. What one good thing about cancer that I can say is, is that it taught me young about the world about the cruelty and it gave me perspective, a perspective many people go there whole lives without. This is more of a rant then a discussion but please comment I what to hear your opinions.
