{"id":8075,"date":"2019-10-19T08:28:13","date_gmt":"2019-10-19T12:28:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/?p=8075"},"modified":"2019-12-22T11:05:20","modified_gmt":"2019-12-22T16:05:20","slug":"umass-memorial-medical-center","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/19\/umass-memorial-medical-center\/","title":{"rendered":"UMASS Memorial Medical Center"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>

The UMASS ACC<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Her<\/a>

Her final UMASS immunotherapy infusion<\/p><\/div>\n

Our summer in MA has consisted of (1) numerous visits with Jett’s family, (2) 4 months of hotel living at Extended Stay America (ESA) and (3) about one visit per week to the University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center.\u00a0 I have blogged previously about ESA and have mentioned her family several times – though not each and every visit – so now is a good time to talk about our experience with UMASS Memorial Medical Center<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We love it!<\/p>\n

When we were deciding, back in May, how to deal with her new cancer diagnosis, one of the options I considered was renting an apartment close to downtown Boston so that she could be treated at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute<\/a>, the premier cancer treatment center in Massachusetts and one of the finest in the world.\u00a0 A combination of factors, including cost of housing, difficulty in family getting to her to visit and, if we didn’t live in Boston, the difficulty getting her into Boston for treatments led me to decide to seek treatment at UMASS Memorial Medical Center in Worcester.\u00a0 At the time I felt that I was opting for a second-best treatment facility due to its logistical superiority.<\/p>\n

I no longer think that it is a second-best anything.<\/p>\n

I learned, when we went to UMASS for Jett’s first meeting with her new oncologist, that UMASS was partnered with Dana Farber and provides the same level and quality of cancer treatment as Dana Farber.\u00a0 That was very comforting, as was the fact that her oncologist was, to quote one of the nurses, “THE lung cancer expert at UMASS” with over 30 years of experience treating difficult lung cancer cases.<\/p>\n

The UMASS facility consists of four large buildings on a beautiful large hillside campus overlooking Lake Quinsigamond.\u00a0 Jett’s infusions took place in rooms with a lake view, a soothing panorama that made the somewhat traumatic experiences just a bit more pleasant.\u00a0 This is a teaching hospital and one of the 3 Level 1 Trauma Centers in Massachusetts, so two of the buildings are the medical school and the ER.\u00a0 The main building is the hospital.\u00a0 The fourth building – and the one where we spent 90% of our time – was the Ambulatory Care Center, for outpatient care.\u00a0 The top two floors of this 6-story building are almost exclusively devoted to cancer care.\u00a0 The parking garage is attached, so we could park and get treated without needing to go outside.\u00a0 Very convenient.<\/p>\n

The staff?\u00a0 Consistently friendly, pleasant, upbeat, caring, considerate and efficient.\u00a0 We never had the kind of poor communication and misunderstanding that tainted our stay in Flagler Beach.\u00a0 The initial plan for chemotherapy didn’t work out well due to a pretty severe neuropathy (numbness in the fingers) side effect, so the plan immediately switched to immunotherapy.\u00a0 I was initially concerned about this because my amateur medical sleuthing suggested that 100% immunotherapy was not nearly as effective as a combination of chemo and immuno.\u00a0 But after the one chemo treatment and four immuno treatments, her tumors had all shrunk, a result which our doctor characterized as “miraculous.”<\/p>\n

She just received her fifth immunotherapy treatment and we are now headed back to Florida – a place that, back in June, when we took the train north to Massachusetts, I doubted that Jett would ever see again.\u00a0 The fact that she is getting another winter in Florida is due, I believe, to the quality of care she received at UMASS.\u00a0 The plan is to continue the immunotherapy treatments in Florida, then return to MA next summer.<\/p>\n

Worcester will be our summer home again next year.\u00a0 And it is because of UMASS that we are now able to talk about “next year.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our summer in MA has consisted of (1) numerous visits with Jett’s family, (2) 4 months of hotel living at Extended Stay America (ESA) and (3) about one visit per week to the University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center.\u00a0 I have blogged previously about ESA and have mentioned her family several times – though not … Continue reading »<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,29,90,8,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventures","category-commentary","category-health","category-places-ma","category-places"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1VniU-26f","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8075"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8212,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8075\/revisions\/8212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}