Hmmm, I seem to remember that the deceptively named Conservatives for Patient Rights have an anecdotal patient talking about how treatment for her cervical cancer was delayed in Canada or Britain,.....I can't remember.
Interestingly, this groups treats Britain ( which really has a "socialized" medicine system), and Canada (which only has a government insurance program with private healthcare delivery) the same.
So how does a cervical cancer patient fare in the US medical system? Are there any delays there?
QuoteBlack Gyrl Cancer Slayer Says 'Be Your Best Advocate'
Posted by Chana Garcia on May 29th 2009 10:17AM
Filed under: Cancer
Comments (110)
I knew something was wrong.
It all started in February of 2008 with some weird gurgling in my belly, followed by a bit of weight gain and bloating. I had just spent Christmas and New Year's in Mexico and thought maybe I had eaten something bad or accidentally drank the water. I was kicking myself for asking for a glass of ice one morning.
Thinking I was suffering digestion issues from a week of partying hard, I made an appointment to see a gastroenterologist. That one appointment turned into many. The bloating continued to worsen and, at one point, I looked several months pregnant. My co-workers and neighbors, excited about my impending motherhood, asked about my due date and guessed at the sex of my baby. Looking back, I wish that had been the case.
Over the following months, I underwent a series of tests before an ultrasound finally revealed what was happening inside my body.
"You have two large tumors on your ovaries," my gastro doc said. "One is the size of a softball."
Now, I had been diligent about making my yearly doctor's visits and had seen my gyn several months before.
When she saw the results of my ultrasound, she thought a cyst she'd found on my right ovary a few years prior had simply grown into a mass that needed to be removed. The process would involve a minimally invasive surgery, she told me, which we could schedule when she returned from vacation in a week. "Your chances of having ovarian cancer are low," she told me reassuringly.
If you go by the statistics, she was right.
Celebrity Cancer SurvivorsCharles Eshelman, Getty Images22 photos These stars faced the deadly disease and lived to tell about it -- and inspire others.(Note: Please disable your pop-up blocker)
Listening to a Nagging Feeling
Ovarian cancer is a rare disease, accounting for about 3 percent of all cancers. It primarily affects Caucasian women over the age of 50 and is prevalent among the orthodox Jewish community. As a 32-year-old black woman, I didn't fit the bill.
But I hadn't been feeling like myself, and I had a nagging feeling that I was suffering from something a bit more serious than enlarged cysts. So while my gyn was on vacation, I called her office relentlessly. I harassed her staff until her nurse practitioner finally agreed to administer a CA-125 test, which is used to determine the presence of cancer in the blood. Normal results are between 20 and 30. Mine was in the thousands.
In May, three months after that initial doctor's visit, I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, stage III C. What followed was a whirlwind of appointments and discussions with specialists in New York City, where I live.
I had very little time to grasp the enormity of the situation, which probably kept me from spiraling into depression. I reached out to friends who are doctors and each of them advised me to act quickly to find the best surgeons and oncologists to remove the cancer. "This is serious," one doctor friend told me with worry in her voice.
A particularly hard disease to detect and treat, ovarian cancer can easily spread to other organs. More than 70 percent of cases are found in later stages, resulting in a five-year survival rate of about 46 percent. It's often referred to as a silent killer because, until fairly recently, it was widely believed to be asymptomatic. It turns out, however, that most ovarian cancer patients experience weight gain or loss and digestion problems.
That gurgling I had noticed months earlier was fluid, called ascites (a-site-ease), building up around my tumors â€" another classic symptom. Close to nine liters had been drained from my abdomen during my surgery.
And because it rarely affects younger women or women of color, it can easily slip under a doctor's radar.
I am a classic example of what happens when medical professionals engage in age- and race-based bias. It never occurred to my gyn, also a young black woman, that I had ovarian cancer. She had almost completely ruled it out.
Proud to Be a Survivor
Shortly after my surgery, which left me unable to have children of my own, I made a promise to myself that I would triumph over this disease and do whatever I could to promote awareness.
If nothing else, my story illustrates why it's crucial to listen to your body. Ask questions, keep records and be persistent if you suspect something is wrong â€" in short, become your own advocate. If I hadn't, my story could've been tragic.
Today, a year after one of the most difficult times in my life, I'm proud to call myself a survivor. Not long after my surgery, I was diagnosed with a low-malignant tumor that, nevertheless, had to be treated aggressively. I still have to undergo chemotherapy twice a month to attack some residual cancer hanging around in my abdomen and to stay ahead of this often-recurring disease. For many ovarian cancer patients, the road to recovery is a lifelong fight, but there are survivors who have been in remission for 20-plus years. I plan to be among them.
Easy To Slip Through The Cracks
With more than 1 million Americans diagnosed with cancer every year, it's clear that we have a lot of work ahead of us. But there's some encouraging news coming out of Washington for all cancer patients.
Under President Barack Obama's proposed health care reform, more than $600 billion in reserve funds would be used to transition our current health care system into something more like universal coverage, and funding for cancer research would double over the next five years. The president has even dedicated certain dollars to fighting diseases that are particularly hard to cure, like ovarian and pancreatic cancer.
Back in March, Senators Edward Kennedy and Kay Bailey Hutchinson introduced critical legislation that would require private insurers to cover routine care for all cancer patients, as well as those participating in clinical trials. It's the most comprehensive plan Congress has seen since the National Cancer Act was passed in the '70s.
The most important step to conquering cancer, however, is becoming vigilant about your own health. Getting regular checkups is vital to preventive care, especially for those who have a family history of cancer. And if you suspect something's wrong, be proactive about it. Don't let yourself slip through the cracks.
No one is going to care more about your well being than you. Take it from me.
Chana Garcia is a freelance copy editor for Black Voices who has been writing about cancer awareness and women's-health issues. To learn more, visit her blog at blackgyrlcancerslayer@wordpress.com.
For more information about ovarian cancer, check out the following resources:
Ovarian Cancer National Alliance www.ovariancancer.org
Ovarian Cancer Research Fund www.ocrf.org
SHARE www.sharecancersupport.org
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The story illustrates the difficulty of diagnosing ovarian cancer... not her inability to get care...
QuoteI made an appointment to see a gastroenterologist. That one appointment turned into many.
and
QuoteI had been diligent about making my yearly doctor's visits and had seen my gyn several months before.
and
QuoteIn May, three months after that initial doctor's visit, I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, stage III C. What followed was a whirlwind of appointments and discussions with specialists in New York City, where I live.
QuoteNo one is going to care more about your well being than you. Take it from me.
Including the government...
Quote from: BridgeTroll on June 04, 2009, 11:28:36 AM
The story illustrates the difficulty of diagnosing ovarian cancer... not her inability to get care...
You are right: For the 50 million uninsured Americans, cervical cancer is completely undiagnosable,......which is the first step to treatment.
The American Healthcare system: Leave 50 million Americans behind.
QuoteFor the 50 million uninsured Americans,
We have been down this road before... the raw number (even
if it is accurate)does not really tell the story... The woman in this story clearly had very good coverage. Not a big fan of her gastro doc tho...
We certainly see that they are part of the problem... lets reform it... not replace it.
What the heck is a gyrl?
QuoteSure. And while we are at it, perhaps we can reform the bank robbery system. You know, kind of reform the way guys rob banks and then distribute the money amongst themselves.
Why cut out the dishonest middleman, after all. He's just making a living.
And then we can have the Wizard of Oz make the new system work like a well oiled machine...
Since we are interjecting humor and fantasy into the discussion... :)
Stephen I agree with you on that. However, these companies operate within a maze of regulations and we are looking at the results.
Let's focus on changing the laws and regulations and tax structure that will remove some barriers for private citizens to gain access, increase competition between healthcare providers, and limit insurance companies to "catastrophic" and "emergencies".
Most people use insurance - private or government funded - for everthing! Check-ups - Insurance, sinus infection - Insurance.
When you get your oil changed or new tires on your vehicle, do you pull out your auto insurance? Hell no and you would be laughed at. You plan and BUDGET for these items and use your insurance for a wreck.
Health insurance should work the same way. Its personal responsibility - we know that if we take care of our vehicles and homes with preventive care and budgeting for unknown repairs and routine maintenance, then long-term costs will be lower (as well as your insurance).
I sold health insurance for a while and despised the system so much that I could not do it. The current system is terrible for the private individual.
Quotehttp://www.urbancure.org/article.asp?id=3159
Rights, responsibilites and health care
How can our health care problems be solved by more entitlements and bureaucrats when this is what is causing the problem to begin with?
Monday, June 01, 2009by Star Parker
Want to know what troubles our American health care system?
Consider the thoughts of psychiatrist and Nazi death camp survivor Viktor Frankl.
After spending time in our country as a visiting professor, he saw the looming dangers of freedom without responsibility. He observed: "Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast."
We as Americans accept that health care is an individual right, even if someone else is paying for it. The truth that every personal right must have an accompanying personal responsibility is now lost in our self-absorbed materialistic culture. We have only rights, entitlements if you will. Few have any idea what the costs are of the health care they receive. Many get it tax subsidized through their employer, many get it through Medicare in a now bankrupt Ponzi scheme in which those working pay taxes to pay for care of those retired, and more than sixty million Americans do not pay at all through Medicaid and SCHIP programs.
Hundreds of millions receive health care the costs of which have little or nothing to do with their own personal realities and then we wonder why those costs are out of control.
Now Ted Kennedy has introduced his solution to all of this, which also captures the thinking of our president. Set up a new government health care plan, subsidized of course by taxes, and call this choice because you are not forced to take it (although you are forced to pay taxes for it).
As Senator Kennedy announces more free health care -- meaning one group of Americans will get what another group of Americans will pay for -- the disconnect between who gets health care services and who pays for them will grow even greater.
Costs will be controlled, according to Senator Kennedy, by setting up a new army of bureaucrats who will get rid of proverbial "fraud and abuse," will decide for doctors how to treat their patients, and will decide for us how we should behave by dictating the preventative measures we must take for our own good.
To put on a show for what this all might look like, a few weeks ago President Obama "invited" representatives from the major sectors of the health care business -- doctors, insurers, hospitals, pharmaceutical firms, medical device manufacturers -- to the White House to tell us all how much they would commit to lowering costs.
The result was a supposed commitment by these groups to cut costs by 1.5 percent per year.
Aside from the fact that shortly after the White House announcement, industry representatives began issuing statements denying that they made any such commitment, let's assume it's accurate. That these groups do not know how to run their own businesses and that they can deliver the same products and services annually for 1.5 percent less if the president threatens them.
At our annual health care bill of about $2.5 trillion dollars, savings of 1.5 percent would be about $40 billion.
Let's consider how much of our $2.5 trillion health care bill are costs resulting from behavior that individuals choose.
Googling around and totaling up, I come up with about $240 billion, about ten percent of our total health care bill. This is roughly the total reported health care costs associated with obesity, drug and alcohol abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, HIV/AIDS and sedentary life styles.
Worth noting is that these occur disproportionately in low income groups who get their health care free. More than half our spending on HIV/AIDS, for example, is out of Medicaid. Can it be accidental that the huge health care costs related to lifestyle issues are most pronounced where individuals do not personally bear the costs of how they behave?
How can our health care problems be solved by more entitlements and bureaucrats when this is what is causing the problem to begin with?
Viktor Frankl had it right. At the heart of the solution for our health care crisis is personal responsibility. This means more freedom and more markets.