So did it seem like maybe things were going too well?
Met with the surgeon again today. He now has the PET scans from hospital one, and it doesn't seem as cut and dried to him as it did with the first surgeon we met with. He showed us the scan -- it's like they have a bunch of cross sections of Diana's torso that they can flip through like a deck of cards. (I found an example CT here). To me, it looked like some white blobs and some black blobs, but to him, it looks like the tumor is much closer to the left aorta than anyone had mentioned earlier. There's no way to be sure until he's actually in there looking at it, but there's a chance that he'll decide he can't resect the tumor. If that happens, they close her up and we go to plan B -- radiation and chemo.
Given that, he doesn't want to wait too long, so we're scheduled for surgery on Friday, May 4. That gives Diana 6 sessions of pulmonary rehab. Because of the change in plans, today's anesthesiology assessment and the pulmonary function test were cancelled and will be rescheduled the day before the surgery -- they'll be done with her pre-surgery workup. Home that night, and back the next morning for what's probably a seven day stay.
Surgery will begin with a mediastinoscopy -- they make an incision above the collar bone and run a tube with a camera and tissue sampler to biopsy the lymph nodes along the lung. If those come out clean, they move on to make an incision on Diana's left side to biopsy the lymph nodes they can't reach with the mediastinoscopy, and to get an actual look at the tumor from the outside of the lung. If all that's good, then they resect the tumor -- he's still saying a pneumonectomy is probable, but they still might be able to save the upper lobe.
We also got copies of all the medical records. Sure enough, somewhere between the intake interview and pulmonary tests, green tea extract had magically appeared on Diana's list of medications. The case manager was kind of mystified, but she says she demands to see her own records every year.
From the records, we found out that the tumor is really staged as a 2a (2T0N0M). The difference stems from the second dimension we found in the reports, i.e., the tumor measures 5 x 3 cm making it large enough to be a Stage 2...not as good as a 1, better than a 4.
In the meantime, we've got 15 days to studiously not worry about the stuff that go wrong. Well, at least nobody's ever going to accuse the surgeon of blowing smoke up our butts...
1 comment:
It sounds like he's being proactive in presenting the "worst case sCenario" up front. You don't want that kind of stuff to come as a surprise the day of surgery. My guess is as long as the tumor isn't attached to the aorta he should be able to remove it.
As for the Green Tea mystery, my guess is that you mentioned that you drink green tea to someone who was only half listening..
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