What a waste of time

Dear Olivyellow.

Thank you for getting in touch and welcome to the online community. I’m Isobel one of the Cancer Information Nurse Specialist, on the Macmillan Support Line. I see that you are a member of our Womb (uterus) cancer forum, I hope you finding this helpful.

I am so sorry to read about your experience during your last appointment, following on from the challenges you faced during the radiotherapy.  I can appreciate that you are upset and angry, this is only natural.

The relationship that you have with your medical teams is so important and it appears that the communication at this appointment has left you disappointed.

It is not clear if this was your specialist or another doctor who was reviewing you after your radiotherapy treatment. We would suggest contacting your specialist, your gynaecologist in this instance, to let them know you are unclear about what the next steps actually are, and that you have no idea who the next appointment is with.

You can contact them via their secretaries, your hospital switchboard can usually put you through, or you can write to them

If you have a clinical nurse specialist attached to the gynaecological team, they could also talk to you about what has happened and hopefully give you some space to discuss your experience and gain some clarity about going forward.

It is possible that the MRI in June is to fully assess the response to the radiotherapy, this is often several weeks after radiotherapy is completed as the radiotherapy continues to work after treatment has stopped. The results of this would guide your doctors, to decide what would be most appropriate as next steps.

When communication has not gone well, it is important and can be helpful to feed this back to the clinical team. The hospital where you had your radiotherapy, Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS) could help you with this.

Please know that you can give us a call on the support line to talk things through.  It’s completely confidential and although we don’t have access to NHS records, we can talk to you in general terms about what is going on.  It also gives you the opportunity to be able express your frustrations about what has happened.

Take care and best wishes,

Isobel

Cancer Information Nurse Specialist 

Ref IY/BL

Thanks for the response, the Dr I saw was either the registrar or the level below that. It was not the consultant gynaecologist. Her Name was on a board in the waiting room behind were we sat. She didn't tell us her name only I am a Dr.