An Educational Opportunity and More
Mark your calendars for Friday, May 18 at 1:30 (EST). Cancer Care is presenting a telephone education workshop entitled "Current Perspectives on Radioimmunotherapy for Non-Hodgkins' Lymphoma." The workshop is free but you need to register online at www.cancercare.org.
The workshop will address the basics of RIT, the latest RIT research, open clinical trials, and communicating with your health care team.
This last subject - communicating with your health care team - raises a point I'd like to address and "team" is the key word. While we have been discussing some of the reasons why RIT is underutilized and why it's important to be your own best advocate, I want to make it perfectly clear that you and your oncologist head the team.
If you think you might be a candidate for RIT and your oncologist has not discussed it with you, by all means ask him or her about it. If you don't find a satisfactory answer and you want to pursue this option, you may have to seek an appointment with a hematologist/oncologist rather than a general oncologist.
It's important to remember that your oncologist is the one who manages your day-to-day care. It is your oncologist who, with you, decides which treatment option is best, and if radioimmunotherapy is chosen, then your oncologist will refer you to a radiation oncologist or nuclear medicine physician whose only role is to administer the treatment. After RIT, your follow-up care falls back into the hands of your oncologist. Therefore, it's important to assemble the right team - you and an oncologist experienced with RIT.
There is one more point to clarify. If your local oncologist is unfamiliar with RIT, you have every right to ask him or her to refer you to an oncologist who is. Most doctors don't mind helping you achieve your goals and will usually try to help you find someone. If not, you can contact us and we will try to help you locate a specialist.
Usually, you can visit the specialist once and he or she will then coordinate with your local oncologist. Normally, you can have the treatment at the facility closest to you. The point is that if you decide to see a specialist half way across the country, that doesn't mean that you have to have the treatment half way across the country. You can usually have it at the treatment center closest to you - and to my knowledge, there is at least one, and usually more, in every state.
Betsy