So I had surgery in December at Scripps here in San Diego and I'm gonna be straight with you about what matters and what doesn't when you're trying to pick where to get cut open.
First thing. You need a surgeon who does this stuff regularly. Not the guy who does meso once a year alongside his regular lung cases. I talked to three places and Scripps had a surgeon who'd done about forty of these procedures. That number stuck with me. My oncologist here said the difference between twenty a year and five a year is the difference between knowing what he's gonna find in there versus guessing.
Second. Ask them flat out what their survival numbers actually are for your stage. Not the national average. Their numbers. Their patients. Stage II pleural like mine, the places that do high volume cytoreduction plus chemo had median survival around three years versus like eighteen months at smaller centers. That's real.
Third thing that nobody talks about enough is the chemo support during recovery. After surgery you're weak and you're gonna need chemo and if your treatment center doesn't have oncology right there or close by, you're driving an hour for appointments while you're healing. That matters more than people think.
I also looked at whether they had tumor boards, meaning they actually sit down and talk about your case with multiple doctors instead of just your surgeon doing his thing alone. Scripps did that. Made me feel like they were actually thinking about me as a person not just another procedure.
The VA thing. If you're filing a claim like I am, ask if they work with VA patients and if they know how to document stuff for VA purposes. Some centers don't care about that and then your claim gets held up because documentation doesn't match what VA needs. Anyway, that's a pain I wouldn't wish on anybody.
My advice. Call five places minimum. Ask them how many procedures they do a year. Ask for survival data. Ask about chemo support on site or nearby. Ask about tumor boards. If they act annoyed that you're asking questions, that's your answer right there.
I'm four months post-op now and still dealing with recovery but the surgery itself went clean. Surgeon got everything he could see. You want that surgeon.