Today, I got a nice little note from Facebook saying that 69
people who liked me on my page haven’t heard from me in a while and then I was
ordered to write a post!
On August 6, I was rushed again into the hospital with
another SVT episode. I will be writing
more about those later, and what I have learned about their relationship to lung
cancer. Anyway, after my SVT was
controlled I was given a CT scan and the doctors up here thought it would be a
good idea for my oncologist to see the results.
I had a sinking feeling, especially when the ER doctor waved his hands
in the air and said, “Looks the same as it did 20 or so months ago!
To make a long story a little shorter, my oncologist looked
at the scan and said he saw a slow progression.
So, I made the trip down to Indy in mid- August and was asked if I would
like to try to see if I might be eligible for a program at IU Simon known as
Precision Genomics. This is targeted
therapy and again an explanation about that is for another post.
In order to find out if I am eligible I had to undergo a bronchoscopy
yesterday. This is a not fun procedure
that is done to capture tissue from the lungs to see what cells will work for
certain targeted therapies and which will not.
I am going to insert an illustration for my reader’s enjoyment. AS you will see it is not a good time.
The bronchoscopy procedure is used for several other reasons, but for me a good amount of tissue had to be extracted to be tested. In the needle biopsy that was done in 2012 to determine if I had cancer, not enough was extracted.
More options are available to me now than there were then. But, if the results of biopsy show I am not a fit then we will go on to chemo.
