The journey together begins

Our Family Odyssey: A Journey Together

Our family’s incredible healthcare odyssey began in the summer of 1982 in Winter Harbor, Maine, when Shirley took part in a hokey Lobster Festival parade.  She felt something in her right breast, attributed it to a pulled muscle from aerobics in the parade, or perhaps the lumpy horse hair mattresses we slept on and made love on.  Her woman’s intuition knew better, but denial is powerful. 

The inexorable movement toward diagnosis and treatment began in the Fall, starting with her internist, Jeffrey Weinberger, then a local gynecologist, followed by a man who was about to become her surgeon, Phil McWhorter, a superb physician. The final step was seeing her oncologist, Dickerman Hollister, Jr., a Renaissance man who, along with the late Joseph Murphy, her radiologist and radia-tion therapist, ultimately saved her life.

The initial diagnosis was devastating.  “We’re too young.  I don’t want her to die.  I can’t live without her.”  The Kubla Ross five stages set in: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. “ I do not want to be a single Dad raising a child, a little girl, on my own.  God did not mean for it to be that way. “ And yet that’s what we seemed to be facing or I was feeling.

Shirley knew from her conversations with Phil and Dick that she had close to the worst scenario possible:  extensive lymph node involvement, an aggressive metastatic form of breast cancer with a very poor prognosis.  Phil punched me in the gut with his words following her surgery: “The tumor was too large and too deep into the chest wall for me to remove it completely.” 

Shirley would need extensive chemotherapy, horm-one therapy and radiation treatment.  The world was turning dark.  A year or so following her surgery, Shirley commiserated with former First Lady Betty Ford on the dance floor at a charity ball in New York.  That was when I first learned of or was able to take in that many, many lymph nodes were involved.  I never shared Phil’s words with her until years later.

Our first sit down together with Dick Hollister was a moment to remember.  We were “playing for all the marbles.” Did we want to save Shirley, maybe, highly unlikely, or did we want to leave open the option of additional children in the future?  Our joint response took a nanosecond.  Dick walked us through his pro-posed regimen or course of treatment: six months of chemotherapy and hormone therapy, followed by six weeks of radiation therapy, and then another six months of the same strong chemotherapy and hormone therapy.  He also offered us sources for second opinions in New York or Boston, followed by telling us he would take our case and his proposed treatment protocol to Yale-New Haven Hospital for re-view. It was a no brainer for both of us then, and even now in retrospect.

Medicine is built  on relationship and trust.  A good physician is still a hands-on healer, despite all the technology and resources to be brought to bear.  We opted for Dick. We opted for and received life. Precious, precious, life and health