currently: @023 (3:33pm) on thursday 1.8.09 | 141 hours since last post
A day without sunshine is like night.
I have stage three lung cancer - a tumor 10cm x 4cm x 2cm in my left lung, partially occluding one of the main bronchial passages. Talk about a kick in the pants. Whenever someone asks how I'm feeling, that title pretty much sums it up.
It's all so fucking ironic, too. You won't believe it. About two months ago, I started coughing. I was just finishing a cold and thought it was just one of those followup things, great, now I have a cough. But shit, I've been smoking for 25 years, I deal with these things all the time.
Well, after a couple weeks and no abatement of the cough, I go see the doc. He figures I've just got a lower respiratory thing and gives me some amoxycillin. I also take the opportunity to have him prescribe Chantix to me, having heard that it's quite successful at helping people quit smoking. I take the antibiotic for two weeks and nothing changes whatsoever with my cough. On an amazingly cool note, however, the Chantix is a god damned miracle drug. Seriously. I started taking it on a Monday and by Wednesday evening I'd had my last cigarette. It was so easy to quit they should just give this stuff to smokers without even asking them first.
So yeah, two weeks pass and I'm a confirmed non-smoker, no urges at all, no habits to break. Still got the fucking cough though. So I go see the doc again. This time he takes an x-ray, and it doesn't look good. He thinks it's probably pneumonia; my whole left lung is full of this spidery white infection stuff, while the right one is basically clear. He prescribes something called Avelox, a much more serious antibiotic. I take that shit for a week. No change in the cough. Finally, Debbie decides that this is something serious, and because it's late on a Sunday night, off we go to the emergency room. I'm coughing so much I can't really talk, and my appetite is starting to disappear, and etc. They draw their blood and pee and whatever else, take more x-rays, then do a cat-scan of my chest. All pretty normal, and at this point we're still thinking pneumonia or some such infection.
Well, the ER doc seriously disabuses us of that notion; he comes in after a couple hours and says, "I see a mass on your cat-scan." I say, "great" in my typical fucking sarcastic fashion and he says, "no, it's anything but great." He calls a specialist in diagnosing such things, and sets up an appointment with him for us a couple days later. They also schedule a PET-scan (positron emission topography) which is a much more detailed scan of the chest.
I go in for the PETscan which sucks because I have to lay still without coughing for an hour. That's tough. We spend three days of the most intense worry, no, deathly fear. Those were the worst three days of my life.
We go to see the diagnostician guy (he's not Dr. House, but I can't remember the actual type of doc he is) and he comes in and without preamble says "I don't have good news. It's cancer. It's serious." Ever had everything you wanted and hoped for and desired yanked out from under you in three fucking sentences. I don't recommend it. See title.
I forgot to say what was so ironic, in case you didn't catch it at the time - I was diagnosed with fucking lung cancer three weeks after I quit a 25 year smoking habit. Obviously I would've quit after the diagnosis anyway, but still. God has a shitty sense of humor.
More later.
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