Category / Medicine / Doctors / Medicine / Hospitals / Medicine
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Getting started
“You’d better find a surgeon”. But how exactly do I go about finding a surgeon? And how can any physician send off a patient with that cold, brusque advice? I go to my office and get on the phone. I talk to Giuseppe, a doctor friend of mine. He says I should call the Gemelli hospital, one of Rome’s best, and make a ‘semi-private’ appointment with a surgeon. He explains that it works like this: if you need an operation, first you pay for a private appointment. Then, after the surgeon examines you, you get put on the waiting list of the public system, so…
14 June 2019 -
First Lessons
I’ll try to briefly present the most helpful tips and lessons I picked during the ten months before this whole story started: 1 – If you feel a pain, wait a day or two, a week at the most, but then go to the doctor (those ten months would probably have made a big difference for me). 2 – Tumours of the pancreas present symptoms which differ a great deal from one person to another. They are often diagnosed quite late, for the very reason that the symptoms are so vague. Rapid weight loss is frequent, though in my case it didn’t occur. I lost…
12 June 2019 -
The Symptoms
Let’s take things from the top. I may sound a bit pedantic with my description of the symptoms and the path that led to the diagnosis of the tumour, but the point is not to make things interesting, but rather to speak to the doubts many people have as to what the symptoms of a tumour of the pancreas might be. That’s why I feel a description of my symptoms could be helpful along with the story of how I eventually arrived at a diagnosis that didn’t come early enough to keep me from ending up with a stage-IV tumour, but it did come in…
12 June 2019 -
19 months later, I start writing
On 31 October 2017, a decidedly unpleasant radiologist sent me off with the words, “You’d better find a surgeon”. It was official: I had a tumour of the pancreas. I was at the Regina Margherita Hospital in Rome’s Trastevere quarter, where my family doctor had arranged for me to undergo an urgent, total-body CT scan. I was there with Gloria. Of all my friends, she seemed best able to handle eventual bad news. Until then, no one else had been aware of my doubts, or of any of the medical examinations I’d already done. Two days earlier, I’d gone for an ultrasound exam all by…
7 June 2019