When taking care of a loved one, we are faced with a myriad of choices every day. Most are small things such as what to make for dinner and when you can sneak in a nap, and a few are big things, such as where to get your treatment or when to have certain procedures.
 
The little things I mentioned are important, but they have relatively little effect on the long-term outcome. Unless you serve sea food to someone with a sea food allergy, what you have for dinner will probably not affect their longevity!
 
The bigger things, however, are a different story.  There are always many factors that play into our final decisions, and I think that one factor that is usually misplaced in the hierarchy is convenience. All too often we make some decisions based on what's most convenient rather than what will yield the best long-term results.
 
Case in point: my wife and me. We live in a mountain area about 90 miles east of Los Angeles. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer, one of the first things we had to do was choose the clinic where she should be treated.
 
Every mile of the distance between our mountain and Los Angeles is heavily populated, so we had a fairly large selection of doctors and clinics. I decided that I wanted the best of the best, and that meant a cancer center that was west of Los Angeles; as it turned out, it was 100 miles each way, passing through the center of downtown as we traveled from east of LA to west.
 
Yikes! That was going to be a pain; traveling that far for all of her treatments was going to take a lot of time and force us to deal with a lot of traffic, smog, heat, etc. 
 
We did it anyway. Why? Because I didn't want to sacrifice long-term results for short-term convenience. Let me repeat that: I didn't want to sacrifice long-term results for short-term convenience.
 
Yes, it was a lot of inconvenience to travel 100 miles each way. But in my mind, the ONLY thing that mattered was the outcome of her treatment, so I chose to endure that inconvenience in order to enjoy what I felt would be better results that would last a lifetime. Granted, there was no assurance that the results would, in fact, be better; I have no doubt that there were many fine clinics that were closer. But let's not rule out the importance of FEELING like she was getting the best treatment, as certified by many institutions that certify that sort of thing.
 
This decision was relatively easy to make, considering that medical costs would be the same (for us) no matter where we went due to the wide reach of our insurance.  True, there are costs of travel such as gas and wear-and-tear on the car, but most other things were equal so it was a no-brainer for me.
 
Be careful that you are making the best decisions for long-term results, even if you have to endure a certain amount of inconvenience. When it comes right down to it, the results are the only thing that matters.
 
The ONLY thing.