What to do if you get breast cancer

If you or a family member is unfortunately diagnosed with breast cancer, please don’t panic. The treatment of breast cancer is very mature and has been making great progress. Even triple-negative breast cancer, which is the most difficult to treat, currently has specific drugs to treat it, and more treatments are still being studied. Most breast cancers have developed into chronic diseases, so there is no need to be too nervous. Most of the drugs are covered by medical insurance, and the treatment cost is about 1.5W-10W (after medical insurance) depending on the condition and local medical treatment.

From the perspective of someone who has experienced it, everyone will experience “shock – disbelief – how could it be me – accept the reality – look for medical methods”. No matter which stage you are at, please don’t panic yet.

Step one: Once diagnosed

The treatment of breast cancer has been very mature, We cannot guarantee that we can find a trustworthy doctor with real medical skills in the first time. I am not a TCM expert, but at this time, please do not rely on TCM. When they were first diagnosed, many people went to see traditional Chinese medicine doctors because they had no symptoms. As a result, many people delayed the best time for medical treatment and their symptoms turned from mild to severe. We all only live once and healing time is very important.

Step 2: Evaluate and identify hospitals and doctors.

No matter how and in which hospital you are diagnosed with breast cancer, you must first understand the assessment and determine the hospital and doctor you want to treat.

The first step is to understand your condition. What stages of breast cancer were you diagnosed with? For details, you can compare them with the table below:

(It is just a simple staging. The specific classification can only be determined after pathological examination after surgery. At this time, the doctor will roughly determine the current situation based on experience and examination reports)

Chart

Cancer hospital

The first recommendation is the local cancer hospital or a large tertiary hospital. This is because of medical insurance. If you seek medical treatment across cities or provinces, the local hospital needs to issue a referral application and file it with the local medical insurance bureau before proceeding (please consult the local medical insurance bureau for details), otherwise the reimbursement rate will be lower than Reimbursement rates from local hospitals . 

If you are in a county town or a third- or fourth-tier city, it is still recommended to go to a cancer hospital or a top-tier hospital in a provincial capital city. But if you are in a first- or second-tier city, then the local cancer hospital or the top three hospitals are your first choice.

Step 3: Interview doctors and select a hospital.

umors form over many years and do not appear just now. Please spend more time researching the condition and choosing a doctor and hospital. At this time, you should be like a shrewd purchaser and conduct multiple inspections. These are all to make the subsequent treatment smoother. Once you have made a choice, don’t change it later. Just stay there and look at it. You will not regret it. After all, it is true. The best choice after the inspection.

First choice: doctor and treatment plan

The first is of course the doctor’s skills. Especially breast-conserving surgery requires highly skilled surgical techniques.

The other is the medical plan. Some conditions are more complicated, include multiple cancers, or the patient is weak and not suitable for surgery, etc. You need to see more doctors to see whose plan will be more beneficial to the condition.

Second choice: hospital environment:

Some hospitals state that there are many patients outside and one bed doctor has to take care of many patients. It is difficult to take full care of them in the later stage. It is recommended that you visit the inpatient department more often and ask the patients how they feel. If they feel that the medical care here is very good, they can consider doing it here. (The heart is very fragile during surgery and after the surgery, and requires double care. The attitude of doctors and nurses is very critical. If there are many patients and the doctors cannot take care of them, it is inevitable that there will be problems that the patients think are wrong, so don’t be lazy in the early stage. Do more inspections)

Consider again the convenience of follow-up medical treatment:

Cancer is a series of treatments and does not end with a single surgery. Depending on the condition, chemotherapy and radiotherapy may be required. If you are far away from home, chemotherapy is fine, and you can basically go back and forth on the same day. However, radiotherapy requires dozens of consecutive radiotherapy treatments, and you need to rent a house locally, which is very inconvenient. You need to consider the convenience of family members and patients.

In addition, the initial onset of breast cancer is not terrible. The most fearful thing is recurrence. After recurrence, it is usually necessary to go back to the original hospital doctor for treatment. Therefore, it is very important to determine the hospital and doctor for the first consultation. Illness is never a matter of one person, but a matter of the family. In addition to accompanying and taking care of the patient, family members are also under financial, mental, work and other pressures. Therefore, these factors must be taken into consideration to choose the hospital that is most suitable for the patient.

To put it simply, if it is a simple condition, such as stage 0-2, you can choose a local or provincial oncology or tertiary A hospital. You can choose the doctor, hospital environment, distance from home, etc. according to your own situation.

If it is a complex condition, there will be one standard, doctor and treatment plan.

Our life is in our hands, who we choose is very important to us, please spend more time here. Don’t just look at a house and decide immediately, listen more, see more, think more, and learn more.

Once these choices are made, we should never think about them again after hospitalization. We should trust the doctor 100% and cooperate with the treatment. Keep your mood in order, don’t put too much pressure on yourself, just cry when you are stressed, don’t feel wronged,

When emotions are expressed, people feel much more relaxed and their views on things will be different. For example, it was dark before, but after crying, it feels better. People always overestimate their abilities and underestimate their endurance. Don’t be afraid. Difficulties are difficult and you can pass them.

This is just the experience summarized by the author based on his own experience and some book cases. It is impossible not to panic. I have read a lot of sharing and popular science books. One is “Save the Breast” from the United States, and the other is “Breast Cancer” by the domestic editor. But my heart is not here. My eyes are watching and my heart is… Two years have passed since I ran away. When I opened these two books again, I found that the pitfalls I had gone through were all explained in the books, but I didn’t read them into them and chose the wrong key points.

In fact, for patients, choosing the right doctor is the most important thing!

Finally, please relax. Breast cancer is not a disease that will kill you immediately. It is a chronic disease with abundant treatments and methods. Because breast cancer is already the most common disease in the world, there is huge investment in research on this disease around the world. , as long as we live, we will always wait for a cure, and while we are alive, there will always be hope.