Living with Lung Cancer

My wife Joanie tells me that several people have requested more info about the Gamma Knife – what it is, why I needed it, and what it was like for me during and after the procedure. Gamma Knife is a non-invasive radiosurgery procedure that kills targeted tissue in the brain. Despite its name, it does not involve a real knife. It works by aiming up to 201 low-level radiation beams from many angles such that they all intersect on the unwanted tissue. Therefore, good brain tissue gets exposed to very low levels of radiation but the targeted tissue gets hit with the sum of all those low levels, destroying that tissue. Here is a description of the procedure from https://gammaknife.com : “On the day of treatment, the patient may be given light sedation. Next, local anesthesia is used to secure a head frame to the patient’s head…With the frame in place, the patient undergoes an MRI or CT scan…in order to locate the lesion in the brain to be treated. Using the imaging procedure, the treati...

I had two new experiences this week: my first chemo treatment and a Gamma Knife procedure. The chemo treatment Monday was a piece of cake. Before starting the chemo drugs, they infused me with three anti-nausea drugs. And to minimize the chance of developing peripheral neuropathy, they wrapped my feet in ice packs and had me keep my hands in a tub of ice water during the chemo. So the nausea that so many people dread with chemo never happened. I am, however, having some issues with my lower legs. No numbness or tingling, but a bit like shin splints. Friday was Gamma Knife day, and that was a fascinating experience. It began with an MRI that they compared with the MRI I got on 12/18/2020. The comparison showed that the lesion in my right parietal lobe had grown 20% in those 35 days. Then they moved me from the MRI machine to the Gamma Knife machine, put on some relaxing classical music, and I just laid there for probably 20 minutes. Then it was over. Today my right eyelid is very ...

Last week was easily the most difficult week since I began daily radiation treatments three weeks ago. The debilitating fatigue and the violent coughing spells are really hard to deal with. But I’ve whined enough about those in previous blog entries, so I’ll move on. This coming week is going to be busy. Here’s the schedule: Monday – get a port installed that will be used to administer chemo treatments, get my final radiation treatment, go to our favorite restaurant to celebrate the end of radiation! Tuesday – get my first chemo treatment (Taxol and Carboplatin) Wednesday – get a COVID-19 test required prior to Friday’s Gamma Knife procedure, see one of my two oncologists Thursday – sleep in and do nothing!! Friday – show up at 5:00 am (ugh!) to get the gamma knife procedure on the metastatic lesion in my brain. I’m a bit uneasy about starting chemo the day after ending radiation, without giving my body any time to recover from the side effects of radiation before it gets...

In my last post I mentioned that there wasn’t enough tissue in the biopsy sample to generate a complete diagnosis. That was wrong. Biopsy tissue was placed in many tissue blocks and those blocks were sent to MD Anderson in Houston, a lab in Boston, and perhaps other places for analysis. In one of those tissue blocks there wasn’t enough tissue for further testing, but there was plenty of tissue in all of the blocks combined for a complete diagnostic analysis. We expect to get that diagnosis early next week. In the meantime, the probable diagnosis we’ve been given is “ non-small cell, non-squamous carcinoma of unknown primary.” “Unknown primary” means they cannot determine if it is lung cancer, a metastasis of my prostate cancer from 10 years ago, or something else. Last Wednesday I got a CT scan that was compared with the CT scan from December 17. The comparison showed that the lung tumor is shrinking (due to radiation) but the liver and rib lesions are growing. Therefore, I’m sched...

I saw another oncologist this afternoon for another second opinion. This oncologist is the doctor treating Joanie for breast cancer. The biopsy report she saw stated that there wasn’t enough tissue in the biopsy sample to get a good diagnosis. The biopsy report couldn’t even conclude the “site of origin” of the cancer. She’s going to talk directly with the pathologist to try to get to the bottom of what’s going on. She agrees I should continue radiation treatments on my lung to shrink the tumor. But without a conclusive diagnosis, it’s futile to develop a treatment plan. The exception is the metastatic lesion in my brain; she wants to plan for and do Stereotaxic Radiosurgery ASAP. In the meantime, I’ve been hit hard with fatigue from the radiation treatments. It’s the kind of fatigue that leaves me so wiped out I’m barely able to function physically or mentally after even just taking a shower. One source of great comfort is Bible reading. Not the systematic Bible reading I normal...