Thank you for your advice @merpreb and @bpb

No, dad is still at the out of state hospital and covered under the emergency orthopedic situation. Oncology is not covered, so they will be sending him back to the home state for that.

I managed to get a sooner appt. for dad at a third option, a top ten NCI hospital with everything that the NCI facility here has. Apparently it wasn't that this top hospital was unavailable, but just that it didn't occur to the current hospital to ask since they routinely recommend the NCI facility instead. They were gracious enough to follow up once I requested it and it's been arranged. This top hospital was actually the place that demurred regarding the orthopedic issue, so he was sent out of state. If he had been accepted here, he could have already started treatment, but no use crying over spilled milk. The current out of state hospital seems to want to keep him until he can walk again, even though their original plan was to discharge him and have PT at home. I'm wary that this could delay his treatment even further.

I guess my main concern right now is that the NCI facility said they were starting to roll out something called radiodynamic therapy (but only for certain cancers, so not sure if this would actually be available in this situation) and they have a special machine for this that the top NCI hospital doesn't have. Results are promising in mice and they have Phase I trials now. Conversely, the top NCI hospital has proton therapy (whether or not it can be used in this situation is also unknown) which the NCI facility doesn't have.

Jump to this post