Take Charge Of Your Health Care

Is it difficult for you to stand up for your rights when you are the patient? It is for most of us. We have been socialized not confront authority figures. If you need help, be sure to ask someone in your family to read information, and help you, speak for you, or call an Oncology RN, or the floor of a local hospital where cancer patients are treated or contact PROJECT! OUTREACH for someone to be your advocate—there are experts on that board and as advisors!  Your own physician should actually do the front work for you, but, alas, that is a perfect world and we do not live in such an environment.

I cannot emphasize enough—DO NOT LEAVE  your mammograms with the radiologist. A radiology practice can make very accurate copies of it for their own keeping—YOU take the ORIGINAL mammogram.  Keep ALL of your mammograms together, just standing in the envelope in your closet behind your clothes, or on top of a shelf—but KEEP them together (see Mammogram) and hang on to them! Be sure your name is on the outer envelope in permanent marker:  return to patient, and don't let it out of your site—if its being read, YOU be there with the radiologist, a good radiologist will show you a great deal, and you'll learn a lot about your body.

Make an appointment when the RADIOLOGIST can see you after the mammogram, if they tell you its impossible, go someplace else and tell them you're going someplace else!  If the radiologist wants to 'talk' to the referring physician, tell him or her to do that but YOU take your mammogram over to your referring doctor and have an "initial written report faxed" to your referring doctor immediately.  

I am going through this now. No, I don't have 'bad luck,' I just know to keep trying, be determined to get answers when I need them or they are expected. This time broke my own chain of command by leaving a diagnostic film for the first time in three years, and it was never acted upon! No reports issued. Someone informed me—after I had tried by faxing requests, phoning, visiting the facility,  for over three months, referring surgeon and oncologist never received a report!  I never received a report (which is required under FDA's Minimum Quality Standards Act in the U.S. within thirty (30) days!  Now, its not to be found; no report was issued and my oncologist and I are dizzy wondering what is going on—and I am none too happy, nor my family, friends, colleagues, or Team!  DO NOT LEAVE ANYTHING YOU CAN DO TO TRUST. Once again, I am waiting—wondering, praying and exhausted, thinking this was the first six month check up I had passed in over 40 months, only to find out I could not trust that "everything must have been all right."  I have no proof.  

Since I learned of this snafu on December 23, 2001, over a week has passed and once again, "its the holidays and the doctors are on vacation."  No, the chief of the practice wasn't I phone and could not get him on the phone with me, nor did he return my phone call. What would you, a patient think? What would the head of the practice have done had it been him when he had a cancer diagnosis? None of us are immune to such errors and neglect. My insurance company paid for these films within days. I waited days, weeks, months. I did not forget that I had to have the report.  Everyone else seemed to have forgotten. If a serious error has been made, how long will it be before I am forgotten, also?

Yes, FDA will be notified. NOT! American College of Radiologists because they did nothing about such actions before for many of us—and FDA turns our complaints over to the ACR. I shall notify my insurance company, and Medicare (HHS) and my legislators, and YOU. 

NOTE: in a case like this, the referring physician is a guilty as the offending physician(s) or group. Therefore it is time physicians began to think more about the litigious (law suit possibilities) aspects of their referrals AND following up.

Pass this link on to your friends—I have recorded my experiences on my website and you may email me.  Please be careful, and ask others to help you.

If using IE browser, click on Tools/Mail and News/Send a Link and add a personal message to your e-mail so other women will learn how to avoid these pitfalls. They are not unusual. The FDA link (above) gives the standards for mammography. One day soon may we be well beyond such errors that seem to bog down our early diagnoses!

Learn what to do when you go for breast cancer screening, and how to protect your spiritual and cultural modesty on the culture pages.