My Liver Cancer Blog

I don’t even know how to write this post. But if I think about it too much, I’ll never write it, let alone post it.

My husband got me an earlier CT scan. It had been scheduled for March 12, and I had emailed my oncologist, emailed his assistant, spoke with the triage nurse, and spoken to my oncologist’s resident about the importance of moving it to an earlier date. And nothing happened. My most recent scan was Nov. 4, 2025. My oncologist himself should have been beating down the doors of the imaging dept to get them to schedule it earlier so that we could know the outcome of the combined chemo-immunotherapy (which ended in December). We needed that scan to take place in January ideally in order to have baseline data about the size of the tumor to assess the effectiveness of any treatment that came after. But nothing happened.

And then my husband had the brilliant idea to write the cancer hospital’s bioethicist and to explain the scheduling problem to her as an ethics of care issue. This is not a step that ever would have occurred to me. Who even knew that the hospital had an ethicist? He drafted the email for me to review, and I said sure, ok, go ahead and send it, while feeling sceptical about the endeavor.

And lo and behold, she was on it! Within a day she had reached out to my oncologist and to the imaging department, and that scan was rescheduled for yesterday. (Scan done – now just waiting for the results. The results could make me miserable or ecstatic or just meh, but at least we will have the information). My husband – my knight in a blue puffer jacket.

And although I am highlighting this one moment — because it ingeniously solved a problem that was making me feel furious and helpless, and I hope has brought my oncologist up short and made him more attentive (nothing like being wrapped on the knuckles by your local ethicist) — I also need to add that my husband has been amazing in a thousand other ways. He cooks a delicious dinner every night, comes to all medical appointments with me, drafts cancer-related emails to various authorities when I’m too tired to do it (and sees when I’m too tired to do it and so takes the initiative), and helps me think through medical issues and how to approach them. And there are so many small but hard moments when I’ve been so grateful he’s with me. For example, I had a chemo-brain episode very early on in treatment when I couldn’t remember which clothes to take off and which to leave on for a scan, despite asking the nurse 3 times. I felt so pathetic. But of course my husband remembered and helped me through it (everything off but underpants, socks, and shoes, which, you have to admit, makes total sense, and yet is a very weird combination of clothing to have on).

And all this when I sometimes think my cancer is harder on him than it is on me. (This is a question for another post, or maybe something I can’t really take on at all in a blog post, but I wonder sometimes if it is harder to face death or harder to face the suffering and possible loss of an intimate loved one. Or actually it’s a silly question phrased that way — as either/or, more/less, harder/easier. Maybe it’s just important to remember that being a loving caregiver is hard work with lots of grieving of its own kind).