Why Erin Gray Felt More Lost with her Second Cancer
Even though patient navigation is proven to deliver better outcomes, few hospitals offer it.
The first time Erin Gray walked into her breast surgeon’s office to hear test results, the surgeon was already crying before she could say a word. Erin is a psychotherapist. She read it in under a second. She turned to her husband and said: I have cancer. He didn’t understand how she could possibly know yet. Erin had been watching faces for a living for fifteen years. The surgeon’s poker face was, in Erin’s words, the worst.
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What the surgeon said next mattered more than the diagnosis. Not the news. The choreography. Here is your oncologist. Here is when you’ll meet her. Here is the doctor who will do your hysterectomy. Here is your plastic surgeon. Here is the order of things. Erin had been carrying a BRCA2 mutation for over a year. She’d known this was coming. The surgeon didn’t hand her a packet. She handed her a map.
Eight years later, Erin sat in the same doctor’s office with a different diagnosis: papillary thyroid cancer. Not BRCA-related. Unrelated to the first. By every clinical measure, smaller. Less aggressive. Less surgery ahead. She should have been the most prepared patient on the schedule. She fell apart. The oncologist she’d known for years told her thyroid cancer wasn’t really “cancer-cancer,” shrugged, and walked out. The PA came back in and hugged her while she cried. Erin’s reaction surprised her: I didn’t have this with chemo. I didn’t have this with the mastectomy. Why now?
The Power of a Guide
The first time, Erin had a guide, and the second time, she didn’t. A guide is the person who, after the diagnosis, says these words: here is what happens next, and next, and next.
