Twelve years ago today I was forty five years old, my youngest child was seven and I was sitting in a hospital bed. I’d been admitted four days earlier after several weeks of antibiotics for a walking pneumonia that just wouldn’t clear up. A CT scan the previous Monday had revealed a large mass in the lower lobe of my left lung and the differential diagnosis was recalcitrant pneumonia, fungal infection or a neoplasm.
I didn’t know what a neoplasm was but my husband’s face had fallen when my general practitioner spoke that word. After she left the room he explained that it was another word for cancer. We’d then driven directly to the local hospital where I was placed on IV antibiotics.
Those first days were awful. I was in a room with three other woman, one of whom was dying and another who’d had a severe asthma attack. As I lay in bed I worked incessantly on my laptop researching everything I could about lung cancer. One thing stood out–the dismal five year survival statistics–15%.
The day of my biopsy the patient before me was a prisoner, handcuffed to his wheelchair and accompanied by two officers. When my turn came the surgeon performing the procedure told me that it was highly unlikely that I, a young never smoker, would have lung cancer and that what he was seeing on the CT scanner looked like a fungal infection.
After the biopsy I had to lay very still for several hours without speaking so as to minimize the chances of a pneumothorax. This was difficult as one of the attendants was someone I casually knew, and she kept asking me questions. My lung did partially collapse, as it now has every single time I’ve had a biopsy.
On Thursday morning my doctor came to my room first thing. My husband hadn’t arrived yet and she stalled, telling me a protracted story about her daughter and some dramatic production that featured a field of sunflowers. She said “You know, a sunflower represents hope.”
When my husband entered the room my doctor got right to the point. “I’m sorry but you have lung cancer.”
I really don’t remember anything she said after that as both my vision and my hearing seemed to have suddenly constricted. I had this sensation that I was in an airplane and it was going down. My husband would end up having to call my family members–I was simply too devastated to speak to anyone.
However something incredibly fortunate happened later that day, something that changed everything.
I was assigned an oncologist, who spoke to me only briefly. That evening my husband called him with a question and this oncologist was incredibly rude. We decided that he was not someone to whom I would like to trust my care. And so my husband immediately called one of my dearest friends, whose husband was a surgeon, asking for their opinion as to a good doctor.
Her husband had done his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, and he gave us the name of the thoracic surgeon he had worked under. And that is how I ended up at a major research center rather than a local hospital. Because of one rude oncologist. To whom I actually now owe a thank you.
#twelve&counting
life and breath: outliving lung cancer 