Talking to Your Doctor

.....or Dancing with your doctor, as it were.

Someone alerted me to this video. It's a recent episode of the show Life (Part 2) on PBS. I've never seen it, but apparently it's sweekly show aimed at Baby Boomers.

The episode is called "Dancing with Doctors," and it focuses on having a good relationship with your doctor -- making sure you are getting the care that you need. A very important topic whether you have cancer or not. It's in three parts (30 minutes total). The first is a roundtable with doctors, and one is a former Hodgkin's Lymphoma patient, which adds a nice twist.

The second part is an interview with the actor Evan Handler. He's pretty recognizable -- played someone or other's bald, sweaty husband or lover or something on Sex and the City. He was diagnosed with a very aggressive leukemia when he was 24 and overcame it. He wrote a book about the experience called Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors.

Anyway, Handler basically survived because he was a self-centered jerk, and he decided that, given the kind of care he was receiving, the only way he was going to survive was to put himself first, not care whether anyone else survived instead of him, and see to it that he got what he needed.

I don't think I could be that aggressive, but I also have the "luxury" of having an indolent cancer, which has given me lots of time to think about what I need to do and what my options are. I hope I don't have to be a jerk, and I can let my knowledge of what's going on get me what I need.

Of course, I also have the luxury of having a good doctor who listens to me, which is pretty nice.

Anyway, Life (Part 2) looks like a pretty good show if you're a Baby Boomer, which I am not. (I'm an Gen Xer, which Peter has read about in the World Almanac for Kids; he thinks it's funny that Xers are "obsessed with pop culture." I don't know what he means by that. And fellow lymphoma survivor and Nodes of Gold recipent Mr. T says he pities the fool who thinks we're obsessed with pop culture.)

But Mr. T is a Boomer, and so is my brother, so they can both scan all of that advice on the PBS web site about "Fighting Agism" and whether getting old is funny. I may have cancer, but I'm still young.