016: Barking Up the Right Tree




Uncommon Sense: the This is True Podcast show

Summary: In This Episode: Dogs may or may not have Uncommon Sense, but how its owner reacts to a dog might be an interesting indicator of their thinking ability. A really cool story.<br> <br> <a class="twitter-share-button" href="https://twitter.com/share?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">Tweet</a><br> <a href="#transcript">Jump to Transcript</a><br> <a href="https://thisistrue.com/category/podcasts/">How to Subscribe and List of All Episodes</a><br> Show Notes<br> <a href="https://thisistrue.com/wp-content/uploads/ovarian-cancer-signs.jpg"></a><br> <br> * For a general article on cancer stages, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_staging">Wikipedia</a> is pretty good.<br> * And for a good overview of ovarian cancer, too: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovarian_cancer">Wikipedia</a>.<br> * Click the chart to the right to see it larger.<br> * See below for other photos.<br> <br> <a name="transcript"></a><br> Transcript<br> This is a story about a dog. Dogs may or may not have Uncommon Sense, but how its owner reacts to a dog might be an interesting indicator of their thinking ability. You’ll get what I mean pretty quickly.<br> I’m Randy Cassingham, welcome to Uncommon Sense.<br> Stephanie Herfel is a dog lover. That alone doesn’t mean she has Uncommon Sense, but maybe it’s a start. Her dog, Sierra, is a Siberian husky.<br> Herfel, a former Marine who lives in Madison, Wisconsin, got Sierra from her son. He’s in the Air Force, and dropped the 9-month-old pup off with her in 2013 when he was deployed overseas. And now Herfel and her son, Sean, are really, really glad he did.<br> “She put her nose on my lower belly and sniffed so intently that I thought I spilled something on my clothes,” Herfel said. “She did it a second and then a third time. After the third time, Sierra went and hid. I mean hid!” Herfel found her curled up in a closet.<br> Here’s where Herfel’s Uncommon Sense kicked in. This is a pretty unusual thing for a dog to do. Rather than assume her new dog was some kind of freak, she thought about it for a bit, and then wondered: is what the dog did in any way related to the pain she had been feeling in that same area for awhile? She had already seen a doctor, in the emergency room. The doctor said she had an ovarian cyst, declared it benign, gave her some opioid [pain] pills, and sent her home.<br> But the dog got Herfel’s attention. “To see her become so afraid was spooky in its own right,” she said, “so I made an appointment with a gynecologist, and in a matter of weeks and some blood work with an ultrasound, on November 13, 2013, I was sitting in the gynecology oncologist room in shock that I had cancer.” Stage 3C cancer.<br> Now, I didn’t know what Stage 3C really meant. I’ve heard of Stage I, Stage II, etc. cancers, and knew the higher the number, the more advanced it is. But I didn’t know what the C might mean, so I looked it up (I’m guessing some of you already know all of this by heart). There are multiple cancer Staging schemes, and adding a letter breaks down each Stage a little more specifically. Depending on the scheme, which relates to what type of cancer is being evaluated, the Stages can be refined with A, B, and usually C. Going up the letters also means more serious, so C is worst for that Stage.<br> For ovarian cancer, the Staging classification was set up by the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics, and is based on the size of the tumor, how deeply the tumor has invaded tissues in and around the ovaries, and the cancer’s spread to other areas of the body, called metastasis.<br>