My mother died of cancer. By the time her doctors finally diagnosed that she had cancer, all our family could do was to take turns spending time with her in the hospice while she died.
One of my close friends from law school, the same age as I am, died in his 40s from brain cancer. I went to the hospital, sat next to the bed that my close friend was dying in and all night I sat there and I listened to every breath he took, wondering which one was going to be the last.
That incident changed my life because whenever I feel stressed in today's life, I think about the people who really have to face tragedy and how do they get through it and how can I help them.
After you see someone you love die from cancer, you become angry when you see someone else going through that needlessly.
Delayed diagnosis means that the person's cancer should have been diagnosed earlier. And because of that delay in diagnosis, the person has a greater chance that they're going to die from the cancer and a greater chance that they're going to have a worse quality of life as a result of the delay. A lot of people come here just looking for an answer, whether or not this could have been prevented.
It may not be easy, it may not be pleasant, but you have to do the right thing. When clients come to us, they want answers. They feel there's a mistake that had been made. They want the right thing for them.
Our responsibility is first to find the truth for the client. Could this have been prevented? Should it have been prevented? Second, is to lift the burden from the client about what's going to happen to their family.
If you believe that your cancer should have been diagnosed earlier, we're here to answer your questions.
