So I'm about 6 weeks out from diagnosis and I'm trying to figure out how to vet surgeons for HIPEC combined with chemo and whatever else makes sense. I've read that multimodal is the standard of care now but I don't know how to tell if someone actually does this routinely versus just says they do.
I worked at Johns-Manville in Cleveland from 1978 to 1985 on the insulation line and got exposed pretty heavily, so I'm not new to understanding asbestos stuff, but the surgical side is completely foreign to me. My oncologist is solid but she's not the one doing surgery.
Here's what I'm trying to figure out. When I call a treatment center, what questions actually matter? Like, do I ask how many HIPEC procedures they've done? Do I ask about their specific protocol for combining surgery with neoadjuvant chemo versus adjuvant? I've been reading some 2023 and 2024 studies on peritoneal cases and it seems like the sequencing and drug choices matter a lot, so I want to know if the surgeon coordinates with the oncology team or if they're kind of doing their own thing.
I'm also trying to understand whether experience with pleural meso translates to peritoneal or if those are almost different specialties. Someone told me to look for someone trained in cytoreductive surgery specifically but I don't even know if that's standard terminology or if it means something else.
My symptom journal from the last three months shows increasing abdominal distension and pain that got worse in October before I got diagnosed in November, so I know I'm stage II and I want to make sure I'm not wasting time picking the wrong place. Has anyone had experience interviewing surgeons or centers and figured out what actually separates the people who know what they're doing from the ones who are just competent?