If you are at least a little bit curious about what exactly happens to you if you are diagnosed with cancer, just read this and maybe you might think twice about continuing to smoke. Only 15% of people who get lung cancer survive 5 years. PLEASE READ ON, IT WON'T HURT TO FIND OUT WHAT LUNG CANCER TREATMENTS ARE LIKE.
YOU HAVE LUNG CANCER - FINDING OUT
Cancer diagnoses and treatment is a NIGHTMARE, HORROR STORY, the scariest thing you will ever go through in your life. You don't want to think about it, do you? Ok, fine, just avoid reading about it, keep on deluding yourself that it can't happen to you. I told you I would describe it, so here goes.
You would think that the symptoms of lung cancer would be breathing problems, coughing more than your usual smokers cough (don't even try to tell me you don't cough sometimes when you smoke). I always blamed my cough on allergies, or pollution or something I was doing like painting the house or cutting wood for a project, or spraying the yard with bug killer.
I was going to my 45th high school reunion. I had a low grade fever and my voice would be a little hoarse sometimes. And I couldn't sing any more - not that I can sing anyway, but I couldn't even sing in the car or in the shower. I just figured I was getting older and having some kind of allergy or something. It was that time of year, I thought. In the Fall. After the reunion, I was feeling tired and listless and was getting tired earlier in the evening than usual. Finally I made an appointment at the doctor for a physical; it was that time of year anyway. They did the usual urine test, blood tests and nothing showed up. I went back about a week later and I had developed a little nerve pain in my left cheek, between my nose and my ear. It was kind of painful, so I thought that my sinus cavity on that side was packed up and maybe a sinus infection. They did an exray of my sinusus. Nothing. I went back a third time and my cheek was feeling worse and my chest felt like I had pressure in it. I'm thinking maybe a heart problem. So they scheduled a visit to the cardialogist the next week. Two days later, I went back to the doctor, the pain pills they had given me for my cheek weren't helping. I just looked the PA (physician's assistant) in the eye and said "there is something wrong with me". She looked back at me and said "ok we are going to find out what's going on with you".
She ordered a chest xray. I went over to another building and did that, and the next morning the phone rings. I was to go to see a pulmonary specialist that day. It's a Friday. I walked in over there, and 10 minutes later I was told that I had Stage IIIB Lung Cancer. There is a tumor in my left lung about the size of a tennis ball, and another place in my right lung.
I can't even tell you what it was like to have those words coming at you from some guy you just met. It's terrifying. The next thing that happened was that I went to another place and got a CT Scan, and then an MRI, and then a PetScan. Then I went to see a pulmonary surgeon who told me that my tumor in my left lung was inoperable. I also had a lymph node in my other lung that was cancerous, which meant that the cancer cells had travelled into the right lung.
By the way, every single place I went within that 4 days took blood out of my arm. I was bruised from my wrist to my elbow. That means at least 6 people took 3 tubes of blood from me...I'm not crazy about needles either. It is November 11th. I am scheduled to start radiation and chemotherapy the week after Thanksgiving. O MY GOSH...
That's what made it Stage IIIB. It had travelled. There are 2 kinds of lung cancer. Small cell and non small cell. It's better to have the non small cell carcinoma. I learned that on the internet. I also learned that only 14% of people survive lung cancer and only 4% of those live 5 years. ONE OUT OF 4 WOMEN WILL HAVE LUNG CANCER.
In the meantime, I don't understand much of what they are telling me. I am in a sort of fog, and there's lots of technical terms and stuff being thrown at me. My husband is a wreck, which doesn't help. You never think of how it will effect the people who love you when something like this happens. My always strong, rock of my life, was a basket case. The most positive thing is that you have no idea what's really going on unless your job is in oncology. Oncology? What is that? What are they doing to do to me? Am I going to die ? What kind of stuff are they going to give me in chemotherapy? What does radiation do? Are there side effects ? I think it must be time to pray once an hour. Will I be able to work ? Will I lose my job? Who is going to take care of the house and the cooking and cleaning and paying the bills ? I was about to find out about all that, the hard way.
At this point, and for the entire treatment time, the doctors won't tell you if you are going to die or not. They aren't going to tell you that your prognosis is that you are going to die, because they don't know either. I suspect that they really don't know until after the treatments are far along.
THE TREATMENTS BEGAN
Radiation starts the Monday after Thanksgiving and I'm doing it every week day and once a week I have a chemo treatment. The first thing that happens is that you put on a hospital gown and the radiologists get some black and purple markers and make all sorts of maps on your chest while you lie naked from the waist up on the cold table. You can't wash off these marks, so forget taking showers from now on unless you tape plastic sheets on your chest. And, it's very cold in the treatment rooms. Always.
The radiation itself doesn't hurt, and it doesn't take but about 10 minutes every day for the actual radiating. It's like an xray, but a little longer. The machine radiates each lung from the front, and then it swings around under your body and radiates your back as well. (It is also sending rays right through your spinal column as well.) For me, the radiation was the worst part. It caused me to feel like I had terrible influenza (flu) 24/7. I could barely drag myself out of bed to get dressed to go in to the oncology center every morning. I couldn't do much of anything, and I tried to go to work, but I couldn't work more than 3 or 4 hours 3 or 4 days a week. I had a lawn chair in my office so I could rest in between phone calls. I couldn't even drive myself to the treatments most of the time. You know how you feel when you have a bad flu. You can't do much of anything, your brain isn't functioning properly, and the fever makes you dead tired and you really don't care about what's going on.
The chemo was every Wednesday. You take steroid pills the night before, 12 hours before the chemo and 6 hours before the chemo. The steroids make you feel pretty good for 2 days. Then the crash you get after the steroids start wearing off is even worse than the way you felt before. I didn't work a single Monday for the whole 7 weeks that I was getting the treatments. That was the longest 7 weeks of my life. I never felt any better from the first day until the last one, and for months after I didn't think I would ever be normal again.
After the first 7 weeks of treatments, the radiation was over. The radiation had burned my lung tissue worse than any sunburn you could ever get. I had a tan/burn area that was exactly a duplication of the "map" of the radiated area both on my chest and on my back. Mine wasn't nearly as bad as some of the people I talked to that had breast cancer. Some of them lost 12 layers of skin during their treatments and had 3rd degree burns from the radiation.
A note about the radiation treatment. Your lung tissue in your body is very precious. It is elastic and pliable. Until you have radiation. The tissue that is left is scar tissue, like you get from any scar. It is not pliable and elastic any more. So your lungs are never the same again. Same thing with any kind of cancer. The radiation ruins the tissue so it becomes thick scar tissue and sometimes can cause you to have to have surgery later on because it's so thick that it causes problems with your organs.
Some of the side effects of the chemotherapy are dizzyness, nausea, sleeplessness, lithargy and along with the steroids, you get neuropathy. That means you have nerve pain or loss of feeling somewhere in your extrematies usually. In my case, I have no feeling in my toes. Try walking around in flip flops with no feeling in your toes. Try cutting your own toenails when you can't feel anything.
Also you can't get around young kids, grandkids, public places, stores, theaters, restaurants, etc, because your immune system is trashed. You have to wash your hands all the time, carry a mask with you so you don't get germs, and make sure you take vitamins like magnesium and potassium because the therapy gets rid of what you usually have. I had to increase my intake of those two at least 3 times during my treatments.
The worse side effect I had from the chemo was (((SHINGLES))). Look it up on the internet. The pain is unbelievable. You have open sores around half of the trunk of your body. You can't even stand to wear a t-shirt that is 4 sizes too big. There is medicine that helps it go away in a shorter amount of time, but I still had it for 3 weeks. If you have ever had chicken pox and/or have had fever blisters, you are very likely going to have shingles.
MORE TREATMENTS
It ain't over yet folks. At the end of the 7 weeks of treatment, there were 3 more giant doses of chemotherapy. They pump that into you for 5 hours once every 3 weeks. The deal is, they give you the big dose, then over the next 3 weeks the poison kills every growing cell in your body. The idea is that the chemo cocktails kill the bad cancer cells that are growing . Then after the 3 weeks, the growing cells are being killed, the cancer cells are dying, but at the end of the time, they start growing again, so then they give you another big dose at the beginning of the 4th week. ( The cells that grow are your hair and your fingernails. So along with the bad cancer cells, a lot of good cells die as well. So you lose your hair. Everywhere. Head, eyebrows and eyelashes, legs, arms, pubic, etc. Great, so you don't have to shave for months and months. You get to wear pretty scarves, cute hats, and try different color wigs.) I talked to one lady who lost all her fingernails and toenails. They just fell out. I was lucky that didn't happen to me.
I believe that there are several reasons that I am alive today. It is 9 months since my diagnosis. It feels like years. I am now cancer free. It may come back and it may not. It might be in my lungs or somewhere else. I am not going to worry about that because I have CT scans to keep watch on that every few months for the next few years. I have great doctors at a great treatment center. My oncologist says he won't say I'm in remission for 5 years. So be it.
I believe that there are several reasons that I am alive today. It is 9 months since my diagnosis. It feels like years. I am now cancer free. It may come back and it may not. It might be in my lungs or somewhere else. I am not going to worry about that because I have CT scans to keep watch on that every few months for the next few years. I have great doctors at a great treatment center. My oncologist says he won't say I'm in remission for 5 years. So be it.
THINGS TO KNOW
The doctor I have is great. He told me not to believe everything I read on the internet and all the things other people tell me about their cancer. This is my cancer, it belongs to just me, and it's not the same as anyone else's cancer. Believe it or not, that was probably the best advise anyone could have given me. The stuff you hear and read will scare you silly. I did get a book though that was wonderful. And there was lots of information at the cancer center - again, if you made sure you didn't get all caught up in the information and get too much for you. You have to guard against that - it would be like being a hypochondriac. Not good. It is hard enough to get through this.
You have to have your support system. That means a higher power, your family and/or friends, and most of all, your own faith in yourself and your higher power. If you need a support group, by all means get one. They are there for you. If you are reading this to learn to help a family member or friend, find a support group for yourself and for them, even the same one, and take them with you. No matter how strong they think they are or try to make you think they are, they need you and all the help they can get. It's a lonely thing, having cancer. Yeah, it's all yours, but that's not easy.
CARE AND FEEDING DURING TREATMENT
One of the things that happen to people when they get this is that they start losing weight. I'm sure that part of it is fear. Part of it is because you don't feel like eating. Part of it is because your taste buds change and all of a sudden everything tastes like metal. That's the chemo. So you could care less about eating. If you are overweight, you are thinking that this is fine, I am losing weight. Nope, bad idea. I think that your own body is such a miracle. It is working very hard to fight the cancer. It is burning calories trying to fight, and it needs fuel. So it needs carbs and proteins and all that stuff. My family was great about that. No matter how much I fussed and griped at them and tried to refuse to eat because it tasted like aluminum and I didn't feel good enough to eat, they fed me every 2 hours, day and night. I ate pudding, fruit cocktail, ice cream, and even some fried food if that was all they could get down me. I was probably pretty nasty to them at times when they woke me up at 3 in the morning shoving tapioca pudding down me. But I really think that is what kept my body fighting the cancer cells. My own little soldiers were in there fighting the bad old cancers.
I have learned so much about myself, my family, and about life. I know that things happen for a reason. Last year 6 months before I was diagnosed, my daughter moved home from another city, and she was there with me to take me to treatments and feed me and take care of the house and her Dad when I needed her. She has been my angel all this time. She made me go to the gym every day because I was 60 pounds overweight, and got me to eat better, which was why I was in good health before all this started. I had lost 45 pounds by the time I was diagnosed. I am convinced that there is a God that has been with me all this time, and that I have some purpose in being spared from death at least for now. Maybe it's just to write things that might help someone else in some way. Be it someone who wants to quit smoking, or someone who has just been diagnosed with cancer, or someone who is a family member to someone who just got diagnosed. I have had several people call me or email me and ask my advice about what happens and what to do, or how to help a wife or daughter or son or husband or other family member through this process. Maybe that's what my purpose is.
I know that God has me in the place he wants me to be right this minute. I know that when it's time for me to die, He will know that time. I figure I could walk around the corner and get hit by a bus tomorrow but only He knows for sure when that is. That's all we can do. Give God the keys to the bus and let Him drive. It's too scary to worry about tomorrow anyway.
