Wonderful providers and staff. Truly life savers! Very professional and caring. We do Keytruda every three weeks and the nurses are so nice! Dr Cathcart is amazing as are Nurse Practitioner's, Emmy and Julie!, read more

I wrote a letter to Dr Buck 2 weeks ago. SW Oncology would not give me Dr Buck's email.. so I was told by their office manager Jennifer Townsend that she would personally forward it. I have asked multiple times for her to confirm she passed it to Dr Buck. She will not respond and has escalated my feelings of incompetence towards this office. If no one can confirm they read my concerns via email, then maybe they will reply via this post. Attn: Dr Buck, I am writing you this email because I have some unsettled feelings and questions about the way my mother's treatment plan was handled and the amount of effort you put towards her recovery. I was not present during the initial diagnosis and discovered how serious her disease was when I was on her results call with you in March. The x-rays showed that the chemo CARBOplatin was not working, and the tumors had grown. As a response you said, "sometimes it gets worse before better", which after talking to other oncologists, I came to learn this is not true. Anyway, you said her cancer was very serious and she had to be on an aggressive regimen. I cannot recall what the alternative chemo was that you recommended, but when you said it could be hard on lungs we stuck with the current chemo. Our decision was a result of Dr Black and his incompetence to implant a chest port, in which the routine surgery resulted in a punctured lung (during COVID19). This pushed us to stick with the same CARBOplatin/OXALIplatin regimen to protect her lung from any future damage. Another thing you said on the call was that you had never seen this type of cancer, so we arranged to speak with a specialist at CU, Dr Leong. The specialist had worked with this type of cancer, and we hired him to consult with you on a new treatment plan in hopes of decreasing her tumors and giving her some comfort. Dr Leong recommended Immunotherapy along with several other chemos.. none of which you prescribed to her. Instead you wanted to keep her on the same regimen and add Immunotherapy. Since the CARBOplatin/OXALIplatin was not working, the insurance denied the whole treatment plan along with the Immunotherapy. When these chemos were denied I asked why she could not be placed on Immunotherapy as Dr Leong had advised and you responded that it HAD to be combined with another Chemo to be aggressive enough to kill off some tumors. Again, even though the CARBOplatin/OXALIplatin had already proven to not be working you wanted to keep with it and add Immunotherapy. During these conversations, I brought up that my friend had applied for and received Immunotherapy directly through the drug company, but you said the Immunotherapy had to be combined with other chemos to fight off the tumors effectively... and that immunotherapy could NOT be taken on its own. When I asked if this was what Dr Leong had recommended, you confirmed it was what was discussed so I left it at that. Unfortunately when the Immunotherapy/CARBOplatin/OXALIplatin was denied by the insurance, you chose FOLFOX as a next measure. This chemo was an aggressive 48hr treatment, and NOT one of the chemos that Dr Leong had recommended. Because she was already at a weakened state the FOLFOX pushed her fragile state over the edge and she ended up in the hospital for over 10 days to try and recover from the new Chemo. While she was in the hospital, I was able to contact Dr Leong about other chemo options and he said that he HAD recommended Immunotherapy AND that it could be taken on its own. He messaged your office and since you were out on vacation, Julie said they would try to apply through the drug company to receive the Immunotherapy treatment. At this point I was happy that your office was FINALLY going to try this route, but I was extremely infuriated that I had requested this earlier and you said it was NOT an option. Sadly, by the time your office had finally gone through with Dr Leong's recommendation, it was too late. My mom's state was too fragile to continue with any treatment and she passed 5 weeks later. So here are my questions: - Why did you not go by Dr Leong recommendation when you found out the current regimen was not working? - Dr Leong recommended several other chemos and FOLFOX was not one of them.. why was this one selected and not the others he called out? - Why did you not try to apply through the Immunotherapy company directly as I mentioned earlier? If insurance denies chemo, it is standard procedure at Anshutz to apply directly to the drug company. This seems like it should be standard at your office, but you failed to take this feedback into account and told me it was not an option. Why did you choose to wait until it was too late? read more