When You or Your Doctor Misses a Cancer Diagnosis

One of the many lasting side effects of a cancer diagnosis is that forever after both the patient and the caregiver will over analyze every twinge, cough, pain or lump assuming "It's back" or "Here's a new cancer." But sometimes the opposite is true: signals are missed, symptoms seem to be about aging, the flu, tiredness etc and a real cancer is missed until it's late in the game.

I'm posting the link below to a piece from the New York Times about how and why cancer's early signals can be missed, and what can happen when even the doctor makes an error. It's tricky, I think, because we still have an expectation of perfection from doctors--but how could that be? But the opposite is literally deadly.

I guess the question is about how to be self-aware of our bodies and when things change how long they last---like noting on a calendar when a certain pain is not changing or a digestive issue begins…so you know when you need to tell someone or ask a few more questions.

In Cancer Land we can be overly scrupulous and worried or we can be in denial. Like so many other parts of our life perhaps this too calls for getting more quiet, more mindful and more intuitive.

Here's the link:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/missing-a-cancer-diagnosis/?smid=pl-share