Dr. Fehrenbacher was the first oncologist we saw. My wife was with me for this one and I voice-recorded most of the conversation. I was beginning to feel like Lenny Bruce and was sure that Dr. Cohen had let this guy know what a volatile patient I’d been so far. Replaying the tape before I sat down to write this I realize my paranoia was fairly well founded. I’m not going to go into detail about why, suffice it to say the tape says it all.
Once Dr. Fehrenbacher started asking the questions that I’d answered for doctors at Kaiser at least thirty times already I began to lose my patience. But I did manage not to go adversarial on him. He was in the middle of asking me about the heart-attack I’d had in ’08 and I just stopped and made a left. I went in to a lengthy discourse starting with how I thought we were there to find out what exactly was wrong with me, what I could expect, and some sort of plan to deal with my current problem. I had also asked for Dr. Corey Schwartz to be my oncologist, I told Fehrenbacher it was because of a feeling I got when I looked at his picture in the outer-office. The truth is, I’m a Jew (Rubin and Cohen so far, it couldn’t hurt to have a Schwartz.) so I tend to pick my people...it’s usually not a mistake.
With this doctor we did find out one quite valuable bits of info, i.e. a normal amount of alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) in people ( I don’t know the unit of measurement) is about 15, with liver cancer it goes up significantly, with mine it has never dipped below immeasurable. In other words all the blood test says is >35,350. That’s the highest they measure. That and a one other piece of the puzzle, we were soon to learn; like my portal vein was almost entirely thrombosed (blocked by the tumors) would prove to exclude me from most things they had or were coming down the road.
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