Fun with Consent Forms

A little behind on this posting but I wanted to share the fun with signing consent forms prior to engaging in the official treatment. As you all know our litigious society has a good side and bad side where people can sue someone over spilling hot coffee on themselves and win!? Ridiculous. Then there's the good side of doing the best anyone/organization can do to explain potential issues prior to one making an informed decision on pursuing a treatment such as a stem cell transplant.

I encourage everyone to read the fine print and question everything you don't understand so you have clarity, but don't forget to see the big picture. Why are we doing this in the first place?
Whether it's buying a car, forming a business contract or whatever, make sure what you are paying for and the value it will bring to your life, measure up or don't do it. Don't get caught up in minor percentages.

After reading my consent form and the myriad of likely, potential and occasionally rare side effects of the entire process you could easily go into grid lock. All in my case I have to remind myself of are what are the options?

1. I could ignore all treatment, and let cancer take my life....this would be inevitable.
2. I could travel to New Guinea, seeking out a local Shaman, get my ears pierced with snake skin wrapped arrows tipped with the highly poisonous tree frog (luaguano-pachinko) venom and see what happens.
3. Pursue all natural herbal essence treatments for which unfortunately there is no data or acknowledgement from our medical communities to pursue this route. I would have no problem potentially pursuing this but it's a total crap shoot with no information other than tabloid type publications. The other problem is when cancer is taking your life, it's not like you can hang out researching anything too thoroughly as you need to get on with something because the cancer just keeps growing and doing its thing.
4. Finally, you can sign the consent form with all the backing of data, world-class facilities, staff and so forth realizing you really don't have a good alternative. I must say I'm comfortable with this choice and believe strongly this will knock out my cancer for good. It will no doubt be a journey, but one well worth it.

While this, like almost any facet of receiving care in our health care industry can be cumbersome, awkward and quite stoic...I had to have a little fun with the doctor before I signed it.

First off, after reading all the myriad side effects from chemo such as projectile vomiting, total temporary destruction of your intestinal tract from front to back, spleen explosions, some or all major organ failures, other forms of cancer, I could turn into an African American with brown skin, death and so forth the consent form definitively stated:

"You may experience some, all or none of the side effects listed below; you should discuss these with our doctor."

So, being a good boy I asked my Dr. if I got death as a side effect, could I still have none of the others? Because this would be comforting to know.

He chuckled, then got serious, then confused....apparently he hadn't been asked this before so we moved on but I felt better for asking.

Take care,
Robb