Tag: Healthcare

Breast Cancer: Surviving the High Cost of Treatment

(Title image: Photo by Alexander Mils on Unsplash)

Since we are now in the Pink Season, otherwise known as Breast Cancer Awareness Month, in the midst of encouraging mammograms and regular clinical exams, it’s also useful to consider a very important barrier to obtaining cancer treatment and services in the United States: cost.

This is particularly distressing because breast cancer research has been very well-funded and treatments are quite effective for most forms of the disease, with great strides also having been made in understanding some of the most aggressive variants.

But according to a 2021 memo from the the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network, 61% of (all) cancer patients describe paying for their treatment to be “somewhat or very difficult”.

It is striking that financial difficulty affects the majority of cancer patients. Obviously, the lower the family income, the greater the hardship, with 80% of patients having to “make financial sacrifices to cover their health care expenses, including 44% who’ve dipped into their savings, 36% who’ve gone into credit card debt to pay medical bills and nearly a quarter who say they did not schedule or cancelled an appointment or procedure because of cost.”

None of this will come as a surprise to you if you’ve ever had to pay for healthcare in the United States. Suffice it to say, we have a problem with affordability here.

Aside from the stressors of the disease and treatment side effects, many people have the added anxiety of not being able to afford the cost of cancer care.
(Photo by Woliul Hasan on Unsplash)

I was one of the very lucky ones in this regard, as my husband and I both work for non-profit research institutes with generous benefits. At the time of my diagnosis, we were enrolled in an employer sponsored PPO (Preferred Provider Organization) insurance plan with a per-person, out-of-pocket yearly maximum of $2000. When we initially signed up for the coverage, I thought the increased cost of the PPO was unnecessary as we were all quite healthy. However, after my diagnosis, I was struck by how blessed we were to even have this degree of health coverage as an option.

Clearly, my family is in the minority in our good fortune. We were able to avoid the financial fears and burdensome debt, even bankruptcy, that affect so many other cancer patients. Cancer care is devastatingly expensive, particularly for those with little to no insurance coverage, or insurance coverage with extremely high deductables.

What options do you have if you find yourself delaying care due to finances?

*Start with your cancer center’s social workers. They have experience in helping patients and survivors who are dealing with financial hardship and can point you in the right direction.
* Visit the Cancer Financial Assistance Coalition (CFAC) website, which has a database that you can search according to your cancer type and financial needs to find a list of charitable organizations that can offer support for your situation.
*For medicines that are not covered by insurance, pharmaceutical companies may offer deep discounts on their drugs. Reach out to them directly. They would rather sell you a heavily discounted medication than not make a sale at all.

Even when it seems that your luck has run out, there are still options available to ease your financial burden. Unfortunately, the healthcare system might not change anytime soon, but please know that supportive charities can to lend a hand as you make your way through the cancer maze.

Bringing Calm into Healing Spaces: Shushing the BEEP with Yoko Sen

Title image: Photo by Adhy Savala on Unsplash

After I was diagnosed with cancer, one of the things I dreaded the most was having to spend time in the hospital. I’d broken my leg when I was 12 and the four days (and nights) that I was hospitalized were horrible. I was depressed and wanted to go home.

As a cancer patient, I wanted nothing to do with all the beeping and buzzing medical equipment. While all my treatments ended up being out-patient–which I was sooo happy about–I spent enough time in the vicinity of medical devices to hear my share of annoying beeps. In fact, that was the last thing I remember before losing consciousness before my surgery…and the first thing I heard when I awoke.

Last time I checked, BEEP BEEP BEEP was *not* a soothing sound.
(Photo by Richard Catabay on Unsplash)

Apparently, I’m not the only one who dislikes the incessant jarring noises of hospital equipment. I recently had the pleasure of attending a webinar with Yoko Sen of Sen Sound, an electronic music artist who has worked with hospitals and medical device manufacturers to address the issue of disruptive noises in an environment that’s supposed to be conducive to healing.

The whistles, beeps, buzzes and alarms are anything but.

Yoko spoke about the stress levels of both patients and medical staff as being affected negatively by this noise pollution. Patients cannot rest and recover. Caregivers are constantly on edge about what piece of equipment is alarming. This is not an insignificant problem as at least in one case, a death resulted from a healthcare worker shutting down a patient’s alarm by their bedside in an effort to make the surroundings more soothing for them, and mistakenly silenced their entire alarm system.

Staff speak of “alarm fatigue”, when everything’s constantly alarming that dire situations are missed among the cacophany that is the hospital situation. The sounds follow healthcare workers home, like echoes that never go away.

Yoko herself was hospitalized some years ago and described the onslaught of noises as terrifying. So as a musician, she set out to help hospitals reduce unnecessary noises and then make the necessary sounds more pleasant while still remaining informative.

The talk was excellent and interactive as she let the audience vote on the different “textures” of sounds. Interestingly, we discovered that past experiences can significantly color the way that we perceive a sound. Yoko’s entire talk was both entertaining and eye-opening. Unfortunately, I do not have a recording of this particular webinar that I can post, but below is one of the videos about her work.

Yoko Sen is bringing beautiful sounds into the healing environment.

I love that not only is a musician looking for ways to make the hospital experience more, well, hospitable for both the healthcare teams and patients, but also that hospitals and device manufacturers themselves identify the stress caused by all these noises as an issue to be addressed.

One of the complaints that’s often voiced about western medicine is that it focuses on disease rather than prevention, on sickness rather than healing. This is a great example of efforts being taken to change that.