Recently a fellow member of the Live from Stage 4 podcast team, Dr. Jill Tirabassi, recorded an episode reviewing a study examining the Time Burden in Patients With Metastatic Breast and Ovarian Cancer from Clinic and Home Demands (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12709373/) and since cancer care feels like a full time job to me, especially during times of progression, I decided to duplicate the record keeping for a 28 day cycle of the new to me IV chemotherapy, Taxol. Some of the results were surprising to me, others not so much.
Week 1
- treatment & procedure — 6 hours
- clinic visits — 45 min
- laboratories — 45 min
- Travel time — 1.5 hours
- taking/organizing/picking up medications — 1.3 hours
- scheduling & correcting appointments — 1 hour
- handling medical bills — 20 minutes
- managing symptoms — 3 hours
- monitoring health status — 1.3 hours
- seeking information about cancer — 6 hours
- arranging help or transportation — 2 hours
TOTAL for Week 1: 23.9 hours
Week 2
- treatment — 3 hours
- clinic visits — 0 min
- laboratories — 45 min
- Travel time — 1.5 hours
- taking/organizing/picking up medications — 1.3 hours
- scheduling appointments — 1 hour
- handling medical bills — 0 minutes
- managing symptoms — 4 hours
- monitoring health status — 1.3 hours
- seeking information about cancer — 4 hours
- arranging help or transportation — 0 min.
TOTAL for Week 2: 16.85 hours
Week 3
- treatment — 3 hours
- clinic visits — 0 min
- laboratories — 45 min
- Travel time — 1.5 hours
- taking/organizing/picking up medications — 1.3 hours
- scheduling appointments — 0 min
- handling medical bills — 0 minutes
- managing symptoms — 6 hours
- monitoring health status — 1.3 hours
- seeking information about cancer — 8 hours
- arranging help or transportation — 0 min
TOTAL for Week 3: 21.85 hours
Week 4
- treatment — 3 hours
- clinic visits — 0 min
- laboratories — 45 min
- Travel time — 1.5 hours
- taking/organizing/picking up medications — 1.3 hours
- scheduling & correcting appointments — 2 hours
- handling medical bills — 3.8 hours
- managing symptoms — 4 hours
- monitoring health status — 1.3 hours
- seeking information about cancer — 5 hours
- arranging help or transportation — 0 min.
TOTAL for Week 4: 22.65 hours
Total for the entire cycle: 85.25 hours
No Half Measures 
Eye-opening.
Reveals not just the time burden but also the precious spoons being spent.
🙏❤️
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Exactly! A few categories weren’t included in the study, such as advocacy or counseling other patients. Far more hours to add for those but I stuck with the study categories for this.
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Oh, my! And you are organized and detail-oriented! I can’t imagine what it’s like for people who lack those traits/talents!
Care to share the surprising revelations?
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I expected the numbers to be substantially higher. It feels like much more. There were some categories left out of the study like advocacy, writing and counseling other patients, but I stuck with the categories of the study. So it probably is more for me, just imperfectly captured here.
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Super interesting, thanks for sharing! I’d love to see examples of what goes into the “managing symptoms” category. For me, it feels like I do that all day every day, so it’s not something that has a clear start & end time that would be distinctly measurable.
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That was literally the hardest category to capture. I kept a notebook with me 24/7 and tried to capture all of it but so much is just the constant mental load and avoidance as well as treatment strategies.
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staying alive and well as can be is a precious task ❤️🙏
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Very true! Thank you for reading and commenting. 🫶🏻
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You are on my mind.
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Appreciate you checking in! Always appreciate hearing from you. 🙂
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