Dr. Chauncey of the Seattle VA Medical Center didn’t have much to say that was encouraging and certainly wasn’t empathetic. Chauncey is an old timer at the VA and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center for Puget Sound, but he is also a man caught in his own ancient accomplishments. So many new protocols have been developed for victims of Multiple Myeloma, but like Johnny One Note, he ignores all of them in favor of his 20 year old massive dose chemo followed by an allogenic Stem Cell Transplant. This is sad, because the fight against MM has developed a lot of new protocols for chemo which use vastly reduced doses and produce vastly fewer side effects. Allogenic transplants are fast falling out of favor because half of the people who endure the transplant get no positive effect from it; instead they are left with an immune system way more dysfunctional than they started with. Of the remaining fifty percent, half of the patients die from the trauma of the transplant and the remaining group sees improvement. Actually, there are even more deaths involving transplants, but because the deaths occur from pneumonia or organ breakdown caused by the transplant they are not considered the result of the transplant. What bull-puckey.

Anyway, I tried to have a discussion about ultra-low dose chemo; a protocol which uses drastically reduced amounts of toxic chemo and has radically reduced side effects while still being very effective against Myeloma. Dr. Chauncey told me that If I wanted to move to Seattle they might work something out, ut it would be best if I applied for medicare and then chose a different facility. Not the kind of stuff you want to hear from your doctor. He followed it by saying that I only had six months of life left anyway, if that.

I concluded that this erudite and ignorant man may have once been the cat’s pajamas for the VA, but today he was just an old carpenter with a hammer from the ancient days who sees the world as a nail. And that is a lot of what causes VA care to be way behind the times. The old doctors don’t bother to keep up with new protocols, instead they try to ride their fading celebrity from the past on inertia alone. This leaves a trail of bodies and is anything but funny.

My omcologist, who Dr. Chauncey referred to as a hanger-on of sorts that was forever seeking his counsel, is a bit more with the times. Together we worked out a protocol that was approved by the drug maker that is more modern and much less damaging to the body. Sounds like Chauncey denigrates my oncologist to press his own warped ideas. But with my own oncologist, I have some hope for the future; that’s not how I would feel as Chauncey’s patient. I was glad to fire Chauncey and certainlysuggest sidelining the egocentric Mr. Chauncey to the sidelines. He violates his primary oath as a physician and renders himself useless to thinking patients. I feel bad for the men and women who fail to recognize that Chauncey is merely old milk, curdling more as each day passes.