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
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
