Do you have your seat belts on?

This is a cleaned up version of an email I sent the medically oriented members of my family and friends tonight.



The news was not so good today. There's not a clear path to take for treatment and each involves major risks.

The first option involves surgery, including checking the right mediastinal nodes for additional cancer (though the PET scan was clean there) while trying to dislodge the left mediastinal mass as much as possible plus a lobectomy for the left lower lobe. Then possibly on to chemo and perhaps radiation. In this case my GH oncologist, Dr. N, wants to use a thoracic surgeon, Dr. L, from Virginia Mason but that would take about 3 weeks, if lucky, to set up and get through the surgical process.

The other option would involve starting chemo Oct 19, after the second opinion on Oct. 15 at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance with Dr. M, assuming Dr. M agrees with this approach. But Dr. N wants to use carboplatin-paclitaxel for the chemotherapy, and the latter part of the chemical equation can cause neuropathy. Hair loss is assured as well as some other side effects There's another drug out there, geftinib, which has shown better long term results if the adeno carcinoma is positive for the epidermal growth factor receptor gene (EGFR) mutation, but we don't know that's what my carcinoma shows because there was not enough material from the first biopsy to test for that. So we'd have to do another biopsy, which I thought was a possibility, but Dr. N didn't bring it up today except as an afterthought to the major surgery path. The following New England Journal of Medicine article looks interesting. I sent it to to Dr. N tonight and asked for comment.

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/361/10/947


The proposed chemo would take 12 weeks, and be administered once every 3 weeks. Then possibly radiation, then possibly surgery. When we met with Dr. N the first time, this was going to be the course of treatment if I was stage 4. Stage 3 would involve a combination chemo and radiation on a weekly basis. I have put the question to him via email tonight: why the change?

I meet with him tomorrow again at 4:40 pm to get the results of the brain MRI which is to be done at 12:30. So there will be more info later. And of course if the brain MRI shows something, then it all goes back into the cocked hat.

I'm the kind of person who reads the ending to mysteries if they get too tense because I can't stand the uncertainty. I'm still trying to figure out how to do that with my life. So far, reading horoscopes is not sufficient.