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Lynette Bisconti In November of 1997 my husband and I were trying to get pregnant. We had been happily married for two years and in November I found a lump in my breast, and my internist said, “I think you have just injured yourself. Don’t worry about it”, and sent me home.
Four days later I got pregnant and while my husband and I were thrilled to hear the news that I was pregnant there was this nagging voice in the back of my head that kept saying there’s something wrong. Three weeks later, in January 1998 I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
This was a decision about my life and I was 32-years old. I wasn’t equipped to make that decision and I was scared out of my mind. I thought naively going in that the doctors were actually going to care about me and see this as something tragic and pick up and help me through it and work with me as a partner, see me as an individual and see me as a human being. When I got to those doctors’ offices that’s not the experience I had, and I sought eight total medical opinions.
Well, after seeing my OB/GYN and pursuing the lump with him he sent me to a surgeon. He came into the room after removing this what was believed to be a benign cyst, he stood in the doorway and he said to me, “I don’t know how to tell you this…”, and I finished his sentence, I said ‘I have cancer’. And he said, “Yes”, and then he walked up to my bed and said, “And you have to abort immediately because the hormones will probably fuel the cancer so you have to abort your baby immediately”, to save my life, to save my life.
Well, I wasn’t really a fighter to begin with. When I first started this whole process I told my mom dying would be so much easier than the work I am going to have to go through to save my life. It took me about four or five months before I started to say ‘I can do this’ and ‘I can fight this’ but my will to live was so strong, it became and obsession. I had to live. I HAD to live, and then I was willing to do anything in order to do that.
You know, with cancer you have all kinds of choices to make and none of them are fun choices and none of them are good choices, and yes, your initial choice is ‘am I going to be a passive participant or an active participant’. I chose my choice was to be an active participant and what I would say to somebody who just doesn’t think that they have that in them to fight right now, I didn’t either, but look at what you have in this very moment and enjoy it and cherish it. Don’t give it up and want it and your fight will come.
A family friend who had cancer 15 years earlier, he gave me an 800 number that he had saved for 15 years. So I called this 800 number, not knowing who I was calling and the woman on the other end of the phone answered the phone – ‘Cancer Treatment Centers of America’. Her words to me were ‘Can you get your medical records and can you be here tomorrow?’
Pattie Berens: ‘I am here to answer your questions, try and help you understand what you need to bring with you. You don’t have to think about anything. You are totally taken care of from your air travel to getting your medical records, to making sure you have accommodations at the facility, to your appointment schedule.’
Harry Buchman: We have a whole team of specialists that just work with insurance companies that will call, check on benefits, see if we’re in the network or out of the network, what their level of coverage is at our facility. We have shuttle services or limousine services to pick them up at the airport and drive them right to the hospital or to the guest rooms where they may be staying.
So every step along the way we wanted to let the patient relax and just focus on themselves on getting better and let us worry about getting them here, working with their insurance, helping with the medical records, getting their travel arranged, booking the rooms for them, we want to take care of all that.
Lynette Bisconti: I thought well, that sounds really easy. I mean nobody makes it that easy for you. So I did. I got my medical records which I had been carrying with me everywhere I went and my husband and I got in the car and for us we were fortunate, we drove 75 miles to Cancer Treatment Centers of America.
Dr. Edgar Staren: What we are trying to do is to put Cancer Treatment Centers of America facilities close enough to the various parts of the country where patients don’t have to travel so far. It facilitates their care if they can be closer to their loved ones. I was amazed to see the way patients were cared for immediately upon their arrival from wherever they were coming. Patients are picked up at an airport or train station and they are brought to Cancer Treatment Centers of America, but I now recognize how important that is.
Cancer diagnosis and having the disease process ends up being so stressful and without question that stress and the disease itself decreases your ability to fight it off. You decrease your immune system when you end up having higher stresses. We do everything we can to try to decrease that stress. We want to facilitate a patient being scheduled. We want to make sure that whatever travel arrangements need to be made that we can assist with those.
We want them to know that when they arrive in this foreign town that we are going to embrace them and take them under our wings; take them to our facility so that they can be attended to and be provided the kind of care that we know they need.
Lynette Bisconti: I sought a total of eight medical opinions and the reason I did that was not because I was in denial and I wanted to hear something different. The reason I did that was because I wanted doctors who were humble enough to admit that they don’t know how to cure cancer, and I wanted doctors who would respect my decisions, make me a partner in my own health care decisions and allow me to make decisions for myself.
The major cancer centers didn’t look at me as a woman who was pregnant, desperately trying to have a baby and save her own life. They looked at me as a breast with cancer.
Dr. Edgar Staren: There’s so much in medicine that there’s simply no way that even the smartest of the physicians could have all the knowledge of what’s going on in medicine. They know that. Instead, I think what happens is that there’s an attempt to cover those things up. There’s an attempt to pretend that they know all aspects of health care to try to calm the patient out, to make them more comfortable. But as a result they detach themselves away from the patients.
They do so because of the increased amount of technical components of care. In fact, many diagnoses, it’s terrible to admit but many diagnoses are made in this country today without a patient even being touched. We depend so much on the high technology, we can’t lose sight of the importance of that simple touch – the holding of the hand, the palpation of the abdomen, all the information that comes from looking at that patient, that brings us back to the humanity – it’s a key component.
Part of my belief in care and certainly Cancer Treatment Centers of America’s obvious belief is that personal import, the fact that we must have that kind of rapport with our patients, that we need to think of that individual as a family member.
Lynette Bisconti: It’s all about individual care. Cancer Treatment Centers of America uses the term ‘patient empowerment medicine’. What that means is you have the right to be a consumer of your own healthcare, to ask questions of your doctor and to have those questions answered, to refuse a treatment or say yes to a treatment, to develop what kinds of treatments you want and to say yes to some of them and no to others, and you have the right to be a participant and a partner in your care. In fact today, with the way our health care system is, grab on to that right because it’s necessary for your own survival.
Dode Hammack: I wish I knew why all of the hospitals in the world don’t practice medicine this way. The only thing that keeps coming back to me is their philosophy that the human body is an amazing tool and it has the ability if it’s instructed properly, if it is fed properly that the human body can help to heal and this all encompassing approach – the mind and body, the spirit, the nutritional aspect, have such an impact, not just only when you are killing the cancer off but your recovery period as well, and they have found a way to make this ideal combination for the individual person.
Lynette Bisconti: The staff at Cancer Treatment Centers of America is caring. They are compassionate and they treat you with dignity. It’s been nine years since I was diagnosed and treated here. I come back here and I still have people recognize me and give me hugs.
Michelle was my radiation nurse, eight years ago, she was my radiation oncology nurse.
The nurses are the most compassionate people I have ever met. When you ring your call button you don’t wait and when you need helpful hints, they are there with those. They are there when you need to cry. They are there when you need to laugh. They are there to tell you a joke. They are there to be proactive before something happens. They are really on top of their game here, really compassionate.
Michelle Bregenzer: Oh that’s so sweet.
Heidi Larder: You definitely get emotionally involved with patients. There’s no way that you can’t, especially if you are a human being, on top of being a nurse that you fall in love with patients.
Lynett Bisconti: What amazes me when I come back is that yes, they are growing and the hospital has grown physically and gotten bigger, but what really amazes me is their commitment to being on the cutting edge and conventional treatments. They not only have this commitment to cutting edge conventional care but then they have this other commitment to all of the other things that they bring to the table in whole person care and it’s all under this one roof and they never ever waiver from that commitment.
Dr. Bernard V. Eden: Many of our patients come here from all over the world to get treatment here and because of that we need to make sure that we stay at the center of cancer therapy. It keeps us on our toes. We need to be aware of all the new treatments available for our patients and it allows us to be creative in treating patients because many times the patients have already had several types of chemotherapy, different types of surgery, even radiation in the past, and basically at their local community hospital nothing more can be offered. We realize that and we provide the patient with treatment options that most places don’t have and that’s very exciting as physician.
Dr. Richard Schmidt: The perception in the past is that you have to be a mega institution in order to provide cancer care. That’s changed because the technology has changed. We now have MRIs, CAT scans, ultrasound equipment, different aspects of care that this hospital has it can afford to acquire. You don’t have to go to a big institution receive those things now. They are right here.
Dr. Timothy Birdsall: As part of what we do at Cancer Treatment Centers of America to treat patients naturopathically we are using nutritional and dietary supplements, herbal medicines, homeopathic remedies, acupuncture, acupressure, we use a technique called hydrotherapy which is the topical application of hot and cold water, other detoxification kinds of therapies – all designed to stimulating the body to improve the healing process.
Lynette Bisconti: Cancer Treatment Centers of America has a pain management team that’s on call 24 hours, that returns your calls within minutes. They worry about whether or not you are in pain and they aggressively seek to restore quality of life and get you out of pain and keep you there.
Lawrence Wiggins, Jr.: Cancer Treatment Centers of America is more aggressive in regards to our pain management. We utilize everything that we can to get a patient’s pain under control and still try to keep a quality of life established for them.
Dr. Edgar Staren: Our integrative model has two important components – number one, we meet regularly. You’ll hear about multimodal therapy, talked about at many of the centers and basically what that means is that you have a couple of doctors or maybe three doctors that are talking. Instead, our team is made up of 20, 30, 50 individuals, all meeting together in multiple disciplines, in addition to the physicians the surgical, medical, and radiation oncologists.
Our complimentary team is composed of naturopathic doctors, members of the mind-body team, spiritual team, our pain team, our nutritional team, acupuncturists, all together at the same time giving of themselves regarding the patient under their care.
Finally, people that may not be directly involved in the care of that patient are still part of that team and when they hear the problem ongoing they will have things to contribute, an idea that the rest of the team may not have thought of. So getting that group together off and provide opportunities for therapies that otherwise would not have been addressed in a standard model.
Lynette Bisconti: When I met Dr. Williams for the first time she hugged me. She immediately became a human being with compassion and my peer. She asked me what I wanted. She asked me what I was comfortable with. She asked me what my goals were. She asked me if nutrition and all of these things that now I know are called whole body medicine or integrative medicine, were important to me.
She asked me about that and when I told her what my goals were and what instinctually I knew I had to do in order to survive she pulled this team in to lay out that plan for me. I had a naturopath; I had a nutritionist; I had a psycho-neuro-immunologist to work on mind-body stuff. I had everybody talking to me working on my plan.
Dr. Carolyn Lammersfeld: We actually are involved with the patient’s care from day one. We meet with patients and do a nutritional assessment, share that information with the patient’s oncologist and actually are involved in the citing, in many cases, if the patient is nutritionally fit enough to begin treatment.
Dr. Edgar Staren: We know that patients with cancer often are malnourished, that a person is being treated for that malnutrition, they are much better able to tolerate the traditional therapies. We are able to give them the chemotherapy. They are able to recover from the surgical procedure. They are able to tolerate the radiation therapy and that’s key to their successful recovery.
Lynette Bisconti: What you get here is not alternative. What you get here is the best possible care integrated into conventional care. So what you get here is the best possible care in every area. It’s whole person care.
Rev. Percy McCray Jr.: Being a hospital chaplain, unlike working in say, a parish or church ministry, we have to be extremely sensitive and mindful of the fact that patients are dictating what we do and what we don’t do. In many cases patients are not really concerned about your theological perspective as much as they are concerned about do you care about them and are you willing to connect with them on a human level.
Lynette Bisconti: Dr. Staren is one of the nicest human beings I have ever met. He is one of the most highly credentialed doctors and he is one of the most down-to-earth kind and compassionate people.
Dr. Edgar Staren: I give tremendous credit to our chairman and the leadership that he put in place to identify a different way of doing it, and it came from the heart. Our chairman ended up having his mother die of cancer and he therefore took that as a personal mission to change the way cancer care was given. How would you want your mother to be cared for? You wouldn’t want an impersonal care for your mother. You wouldn’t want her to be addressed as a number. You wouldn’t want her to wait days or weeks for test that be performed.
If a person has cancer and it’s your mother you want them taken care of yesterday and you want them taken care of by individuals that recognize that it’s your mother. That’s what we do here.
Rev. Percy McCray Jr.: The mother standard is that if your mom was in a position that she needed help you would do everything and anything to give her that opportunity to move forward.
Lynette Bisconti: For the patients to remember all of the people who cared for them we come here very vulnerable and we have people who show us compassion.
Michelle Bregenzer: Here I think everybody has the deer in the headlights when they first come in. I really do and for us, just to approach them and just to even touch them and just say ‘you know, we are here for you. What is it that we can do; what can I do for you right now?’
Man: This gives us an opportunity to hear from the people we serve how we are doing. Believe me, you do so much more for us than we ever do for you.
Patient: I am from Colorado and I was diagnosed with breast cancer four years ago, actually almost five. And the reason I am here is actually because my insurance changed at the beginning of the year and I now can come here because two years ago we actually looked into this and so I am very excited and I actually have some hope. That’s why I am here.
Caregiver: What I like is they are very compassionate. They come right up and there I see them hugging other patients and already coming up and grabbing us, “So how are you doing today?” So that’s really important.
Lynette Bisconti: Now you are a caregiver.
Caregiver: Right.
Lynette Bisconti: So how are you supported here differently than you may have been supported elsewhere.
Caregiver: Oh, you know helping me with my food, my meals - I understand you can get massage here too. It’s just as important for the caregiver to have a good spirit and to have their energy up as it is for the patient.
Lynette Bisconti: So what do you think of this infusion room?
Caregiver: Oh it’s beautiful.
Lynette Bisconti: As opposed to elsewhere, yeah.
Caregiver: It’s beautiful – beautiful view, very tranquil, relaxing.
Lynette Bisconti: What I would do is I would take my chemo pull upstairs to the solarium and I sit up there in the sunshine and have chemo all day but this room is gorgeous.
Caregiver: It is beautiful.
Heidi Larder: I think that once people come here that’s when they say ‘that’s where I want to be. I don’t want to be anywhere else’ but before that point I think that you are used to the regular run in the mill hospital where you are treated like a number and people don’t know your name and I think that’s sad. You have to have hope to fight cancer. If you don’t have hope I don’t see how you get out of bed every morning.
Michelle Bregenzer: Well, like Lynette, I haven’t seen her in nine years and now I get to take care of her in after care. So now I get to take care of any issues that come up from either her treatment or her cancer. So you never end your care, ever. There’s a lot of issues that don’t get addressed after the patients are done, plus they are coming just for their re-evaluations so they are more focused on ‘are my scans still going to be good, or is my tumor mark is still going to be good’ and they forget to tell the doctor certain things that are, certain issues that have come up and that’s where we can step in and we remind them that we are here to take care of you from the top of your head all the way down to your toes.
Loretta Swan: The aftercare was something that I could not have imagined. They answered so many of the questions that I had in my mind.
Dr. Daniel Nader: It’s very important that we have good follow up for our patients because we know that cancer is a disease that we may stomp it out temporarily but it will try to raise its ugly head again and so we want to be right on top of it. We don’t want any surprises. So we have a very comprehensive follow up program for all of our patients. I see them on every three-month basis and so that follow up visit includes diagnostic evaluation, my physical examination of the patients and then assessing them to see how they are doing to make sure that we are not having any evidence of recurrent disease.
Lynette Bisconti: I have had the privilege to volunteer my time to Cancer Treatment Centers of America and I do that because they continue to deliver on this promise that they made to their patients. Cancer Treatment Centers of America is growing. It’s much more beautiful than it was even nine years ago.
And the doctors have not lost that wonderful compassionate respectful feeling for their patients. So when I come here now I come here with a sense of pride because this place continues to be what I had always hoped it would continue to be and I still tell everybody that I know that if – God forbid you are in that position, go there, give yourself that gift. If you are a person who thinks ‘I am just not that kind of a fighter. I can’t do it’ – I was you. I was saying in those first few months ‘I can’t do this. Dying is so much easier.’
But what you get if you survive and if you do this is so rewarding and so wonderful, it’s worth every mile traveled; it’s worth every second spent in a hospital and it’s just worth everything – everything.
Dode Hammack: Don ‘t ever let anyone take away your hope. I will reiterate again, there is no expiration date stamped on your body anywhere. If you believe, if you truly want to live, if you truly want to beat this disease it can be done. I am living, breathing proof that it can be done. I was given a death sentence and I am here today because of the treatment of Cancer Treatment Centers.
Heidi Larder: Almost all of my patients have been somewhere else first and when they come here that’s when they know they are really taken care of. But a lot of patients get treated closer to their home first and then they decide to go somewhere else, once they are not happy with their treatment.
We have many, many patients that have been told they only have six months, they only have six weeks – no doctor is God and no one can tell you exactly when you are going to die or when you are not going to be able to do anything anymore with your life.
Dr. Edgar Staren: Doctors don’t know how long a patient has to live. Unfortunately we get so used to hearing statistics; we are trained in medical school to see numbers and associate a certain disease process and a disease stage with a certain lifespan. The only person that knows how long a patient has left is God and for clinicians to take away that hope from a patient is just simply not right. Our obligation is to identify if the patient wants to fight, and if that patient wants to fight we want to be there to fight with them and provide them opportunities to help beat the cancer. No one can tell them how long they have to live, all you can do is take their hope away and that’s just simply not right.
Lynette Bisconti: You know, if you are beaten down; if you are sick and tired from having been treated elsewhere, if you have been given no hope, my only words would be take one last chance and get to Cancer Treatment Centers of America because I guarantee you the minute you walk through these doors your hope will be restored, compassion will be given to you and you will be given an opportunity to get your fight back because people will be fighting with you – every step of the way.
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