"Oh my gosh … it was always on a Friday."
Sitting in a chair with an IV drip attached to her arm, Amy Darragh was at the end of her first chemotherapy treatment for a rare form of bladder cancer that also affected one of her kidneys. Her diagnosis had come after recurring urinary tract infections that always seemed to crop up with the same unfortunate timing.
"I don't know what the rhythm in my body was; it always fell on a Friday," Darragh said. Sometimes that meant toughing it out and waiting over the weekend until she could get into her doctor's office. Other times it meant late night trips to urgent care. Those trips eventually led to her diagnosis, "but there were moments that it would have been really nice not to wait … because it eases the anxiety."
Darragh had surgery to remove the tumor and a kidney, and her doctor expects chemotherapy to be curative. Now, as she moves forward with this treatment, she'll have less reason to worry about managing side effects and symptom flare-ups if they happen on a Friday, thanks to the Oncology Evaluation Center (OEC) at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP). It's a bit like an urgent care specifically tailored to cancer patients, providing evaluation and symptom management for situations including dehydration, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and pain flares. The center is now open 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, after running for almost a decade at a smaller scale alongside regular cancer infusions at HUP. It is designed to give patients more tools in their fight against cancer and more control over their time.
"It's so nice to tell the patients that they have a place to go on the weekends and they have that sense of relief that there's support," said Marie I. Carrera, CRNP, the center's clinical coordinator.
