Biopsy is finally scheduled and my first experience at the main Sloan hospital

Today, I had to go for pre-op testing (blood and EKG) to the main Sloan Kettering Center. All my previous Sloan appointments have been at their outpatient facility, so this is my first time at the main campus. At the outpatient facility every effort is made to not look like a hospital or even a doctor’s office. There is an awesome espresso and latte machine along with a snack bar on every floor and the doctor’s offices are hidden out of sight behind walls of orchids. It is more like an apartment building on a busy Manhattan Street with a doorman.

The main Sloan Kettering campus is basically a big cancer hospital. You can tell this before you even enter. The majority of people going in and out of the building have their heads covered with a scarf or a baseball cap and they are thin and have this pale, blue-ish color. There is no avoiding it. You are in a cancer hospital.

Later in the day I went to visit a friend in Bellevue Hospital and I was struck by the difference. There you have people, some in wheelchairs, but they don't necessarily look sick and they might not even be sick at all, like the lady I passed in a wheel chair who had two balloons with "congratulations it’s a boy" and "congratulations it’s a girl" written on them. Everyone is there for a different reason, but it's hard to tell exactly why, unlike when you enter the Sloan Kettering Hospital. The only thing you don’t know there is what type of cancer the person might have but you know their illness.

Experience has taught me to request all my lab work and final reports from my doctor. I keep all this information with me on all my visits which was very helpful to the ER doctors this past weekend. Since I had to go up to Dr. B’s office, I asked for my latest, final CT scan report. Unlike my final CT scan report from Cornell there were many words that I did not understand. The report from Sloan was also a comparison to the previous Cornell report. Dr. B told me that we needed this new CT scan report to help answer some of the questions that came out of the previous Cornell report. It was obvious to me that the new CT scan only raised more questions and did not provide any answers. That is why Dr. B requested the CT scan guided biopsy. After numerous phone calls and a lot of perserverance, I am now scheduled to have the procedure done on Monday, March 30. I am relieved and hope that the needle biopsy will provide some answers that will allow the doctors to develop a definite path forward instead of exploratory surgery.