Rabbits

Today, I’m feeling incredibly encouraged.  Luckily, I couldn’t muster the energy to write the last few days because those posts would have been far less optimistic.  Yesterday was a dark day.  But today, I feel the light.  I see the light.  Lightness.

We met with a new oncologist at Stanford today and I am reminded of a fact that I learned at a very young age:  having a world class institution in our backyard makes us among the luckiest SOBs in the world.  We are SO lucky.    I felt that today.

This doctor was so much different than our original oncologist.  I walked out of our first meeting with her feeling…down and unheard.  Now granted, we’d just been given a pretty terrible prognosis.  But I felt like she was reciting a script.  That we were a number.  That she saw no reason to fight – this simply WAS.    And that was that.

Today was different.  The diagnosis, prognosis and treatment plan remained the same.  But the attitude.  The ethos.  The response to the same questions that I asked of our original gal.  It was SO very different.  Open.  Encouraging.  He made us feel like he had an infinite bag of tricks and we were just starting with the first.  That he’d pull rabbit after rabbit out of his hat.    I made this comment to my aunt on my drive home and she said “that is how I ALWAYS felt with your dad.  Stanford never got to the bottom of that bag.  They always had another rabbit to pull out.  Another trick to try.  Something new to focus on”. And THAT is the medical education I got at a very young age – that you believe in the miracles and pace of innovation of modern medicine.  You hold on and wait for the next thing to come.  Because that next thing might be the life change.  Like it was for my dad.  Hope was gone. There was nothing left to do.  But Stanford pulled out one last rabbit and that rabbit cured my dad of a 15 year fight with cancer.

Rabbits.   We want the man…the institution that has the most rabbits.  Or at least the belief that they can pull rabbits out of thin air.  And this guy we met today… I’d follow him anywhere.

Belief.  Hope.  Confidence.  Swagger.   All of this is critical to the process.

We checked a big box today.   It felt good.    It also felt like coming home.  My mom said to the new doctor “Stanford has always done right by me.  You’ve made miracles.  You’ve made me believe when I had no more hope.   And then you proved to me why I was right to believe in you.  Let’s do that again”.

Let’s do that again.