Haven't been
on this list all that long. Am on two others that tend to keep me pretty
busy, so have been lurking here. Time to "come out" I
guess.
I have
non-small cell lung cancer, adenocarcinoma, stage IIIA. Dx'd 3/99.
Had surgery for removal of the primary lesion 4/7/99 at MD Anderson
(Garrett Walsh, Surgeon and WONDERFUL!) They took the upper two sections
of the upper left lobe. They found mets to two lymph nodes when they went
in, so that "upped" me to IIIA. Surgery was followed by five
weeks of radiation. No chemo since, with surgery to remove it, there was
no tumor to follow and no way to measure effectiveness. I completed
radiation Houston on 6/14 and came home to Nevada (60 miles east of
Reno).
I also have
severe COPD -- seriously enough that they weren't going to operate at
first. Then they ran pulmonary function tests on me and I knocked their
socks off. Despite my severely reduced lung function, my exercise
tolerance in their testing was 90% of what would be predicted for someone with
normal lung function. That made me an immediate surgical candidate.
I'm so glad that I had been exercising RELIGIOUSLY -- an hour a day -- on the
treadmill at the time I got the cancer Dx! And I am a fanatic about the
benefits of exercise.
I was back on
the treadmill the day after I was discharged from the hospital. I asked
the surgeon for a referral to rehab following surgery and was shocked to learn
that they had no such thing for thoracic patients at MD Anderson. (That's
about to change!)
The radiation
oncologist told me I might exercise through the first couple of weeks of
radiation but there was NO WAY I would be exercising beyond that.
WRONG! I had very minimal side effects with the radiation -- just a bit of
a sore throat for maybe 2-3 days. Exercised every day through
radiation. By the end, the docs told me after what they'd seen with me I'd
made believers of them. They're now instituting a pulmonary rehab unit at
MD Anderson!!
At one
point in my Internet wanderings I found a study they'd done in Europe on
hospitalized chemo patients. Half the group was randomized to exercise for
30 minutes a day on an ergonometer (pedal machine) in bed. The other half
got no exercise. To a patient, those who got the exercise suffered fewer,
or no, side effects and almost no mood alteration with the drugs while the
non-exercising group had the usual side effects and mood
alterations. Their firm conclusion was that we needed to look at
exercise for cancer patients much more seriously.
I had some
adjusting to do when I came home to 4000' from sea level in Houston, and they'd
told me it was an experiment to send me to altitude. I seem to be doing
fine although scarring from the radiation will reduce lung function some over
the next few months, and I won't know until November or so whether I can stay
here at this altitude. In the meantime, I'm going everything I can to
enhance lung function and offset the effects of the radiation.
Sorry this is
so long, and maybe that's probably more than you wanted to hear. But I'm
now "out of the closet" and will keep my posts shorter and to the
point in the future!!
Thanks Mary: What stage lung cancer do you
have? How long have you been with us quiet as a little mouse? Is
your onc. at MD ANDERSON? Are you going to go into this trial?
Thank you so much for speaking out, your friend, lillian
Subject: Re: [MOL] Tests called
near on turmor-starvomg drug!
The trial I'm
aware of at MD Anderson is being planned by Dr. Roy Herbst and is for
lung cancer. That's about as much as I know. He's my medical
oncologist and mentioned it to me when I was there last
week.
Mary, thank you so much for letting us know about
the trial. It came just in the nick of time, I have a friend
leaving for MD Anderson today and this is exactly the animunition
she needed. How can I ever thank you enough and by the way,
welcome to our wonderful forum. Your friend,
lillian
MD Anderson is
also in the planning stages for an endostatin trial -- Probably
November.
