A Long, Strange Trip -- Chapter 2

The story at the end of the previous chapter/posting looked like it was ready to close out: Randy gets sick, Randy goes to the hospital, Randy gets better and goes home. Geez, I wish...

The wheels started to fall off that story during a visit with my family physician on Friday morning. (That would be March 11, for those of you keeping score...) She looked at the reports of the X-Ray and CT scan and just shook her head and said: "I don't think pneumonia had anything to do with your chest pain." While that was a bit disturbing (missed diagnoses are never reassuring!), it sounded "right" somehow. I had pneumonia several years ago and what I was feeling on Tuesday during my drive home to West Chester was totally different from what I felt back then. But I guess I was so relieved that there was no sign of a blood clot that I wasn't really paying close attention to what the pain was (as opposed to what it wasn't).

But more important than the chest pain issue was the wording in the CT scan report. And I was hoping that she would be familiar with a couple of terms that I had never heard, but which didn't sound very encouraging. (And Google searches on the words in question were even more alarming.)

The report said my lung(s) might have "primary or metastatic neoplasm; [and that] bronchioalveolar carcinoma often contains [such structures as those identified in the scan]." I won't bother putting in links here for the puzzling terms -- you probably recognize the "hot button" words the report uses...

So, just in case you're losing track here (which would be perfectly understandable), allow me to summarize where we are: I go to an Emergency Room because of a pain in my chest. The pain is (quite possibly) misidentified as caused by pneumonia. But the lab tests to help diagnose the source of the pain show up the possiblility that my cancer has spread to my lungs.

So that was last Friday, and it's now late Wednesday. And I've been trying ever since I got home to get the attention of one of the doctors who treated me for cancer: What does this all mean? Has my cancer metastasized? Why haven't we ever scanned my lungs or liver or anywhere else to check to see if it's moved to somewhere else?

My family doc has been terrific, but she readily admits that the terms in the scan report are beyond her training and experience. (That's one of the things I like so much about her! She will readily admit that there's stuff she doesn't know and needs to find out about.) I've taken copies of the scan reports to my chemo doc and my E/N/T doc, but haven't heard back from either one of them. So she's put in a separate "professional" request to my chemo doc to try and get his attention. My specialist docs are busy people -- and I think they're pretty well convinced that I'm out of the woods on this cancer thing.

And I hope and pray they're right and my anxieties are baseless.

Oh yeah, one more thing: the treatment I got at the Jennersville hospital (which included up to three different types of antibiotic at the same time), seems to have wiped out all the "good" bacteria in my digestive tract, leaving me with a severe case of diarrhea. I kind of wish I had the time and energy to get annoyed at that...

And what, pray tell, caused the serious chest pain that started all this?

More later when things clarify.