General Concepts of Surgical Management

The fact that you have bought this book is almost certainly because you have been diagnosed as having cancer. The process by which that diagnosis was made will, I know, have caused you great distress and seemed to have taken ages. For the majority of you, hopefully, it will have taken no more than a few weeks, but those few weeks will have been psychologically and/or physically painful and stressful. You will almost certainly have gone to your general practitioner, perhaps with a swelling in your tummy or some irregularity of bleeding, or perhaps with pain. Your general practitioner will have examined you, performed tests, and referred you either to a general gynaecologist or to some form of rapid assessment clinic, or perhaps directly to a gynecological cancer specialist. If you have attended the first two, then you may have been further referred to a gynecological cancer specialist. A gynecological cancer specialist will be a highly trained surgeon who will have specially trained in the area and will be somebody who you can feel certain is up to date in modern management of gynecological cancer, who understands the different types of treatment and will work within a large team of individuals. These teams meet at what are called multidisciplinary team meetings on a regular (weekly or fort-nightly) basis. At these meetings, there are usually two or more surgeons, a radiotherapist, one or more medical oncologists who prescribe chemotherapy, a radiologist who takes and reads scans, x-rays, etc., a specialist oncology nurse, and a pathologist. All of these consultants may well have junior members in their respective teams, who will also attend these meetings and whom you may see during your care. These meetings ensure that you are offered the optimal treatment and that no one group, for example, the surgeon or the radiotherapist, can steer you into the wrong therapy.