The Taber Family Blog

Today Denise and I met with the Stanford Tumor Board. Left the house at 6:30am to get to Palo Alto by 9:00am. Smack dab during the morning commute for nearly the entire bay area. Amazingly we got there 10 minutes before 9:00am. Whew.

Pretty amazing medical center overall and really gives you a sense of how much medical knowledge is contained in this place. It helped me feel as though I was being seen by some of the best. There were a lot of people there today, because it was the first day head and neck tumors would be evaluated after the holidays. So lots of folks in various stages of cancer were mingling about. I was finally called in and immediately seen by a caravan of doctors. It was like a circus clown car, where a doctor kept coming into my room, putting on gloves, sticking his/her fingers in my mouth, talking amongst themselves about what they had seen and then the next few doctors would do the very same thing. Thought I was gonna hurl there a few times. Had the camera stuck into my nose and down my throat once again. Lovely. Denise was right there next to me and got a front row seat view of the inside of my throat on the LCD panel. I couldn’t see anything because all the doctors were right in my grill. Literally.

So once they all left, I was told to wait for about an hour and half until I could see the main doctor, Dr. Michael Kaplan about my assessment. It wasn’t until about 2:30 – 3:00 before we were seen. Dr. Kaplan said they had never received my images from the MRI, PET-CT or the pathology report. Apparently I was supposed to have brought it with me, but since I was never advised to do that by my local doctor, the assessment would have to be made on what the doctors saw and learned from Dr. Woolf’s report. Good thing though, since the imaging wouldn’t have changed my recommended treatment anyway. Dr. Kaplan recommended immediately starting the radiation and chemo. I told him we would have Dr. Woolf’s office overnight the imaging to him to so he could put a finer point on his assessment.

Following this ordeal, Denise and I decided to avoid the horrific south bay to east bay commute home and enjoy a relaxing afternoon at the Stanford Shopping Center. We had lunch at Max’s Opera Cafe, bought some chocolate truffles and generally tried our best to fill the time until the commute traffic died down around 7pm.