Issues Addressed with Every Mom and Dad
Dr. Leonard Wexler: There are usually two or three issues that I address, with or without prompting, with moms adn dads at every first visit, and that is:
- Why did this happen?
- Did I did something to cause this to happen?
- Could it have been prevented?
- Could it have been caught earlier?
And the answer to those questions are almost uniformly: There is nothing that you could have done to have caught it sooner. It has nothing to do with anything that happened during conception or during pregnancy. What you need to know about sarcomas is that they are aggressive cancers, cancers that typcially don't get caught early like a breast cancer on a mammography. There is no screening test that you can do for them. They're not preventable, and except in the very rarest circumstances they are not hereditary. And these are things that, I think, need to be covered at the time of the first visit, because they haunt families otherwise forever.