I am Mary. This is my memory of “the day the earth stood still.” My husband, John, will give you his version of “the diagnosis” in later posts. I have a sort of gestalt view, where days get mixed up, but John’s view will be more detailed.
John & Mary -- John's Story
John has never smoked a cigarette in his life. I say that not because it makes him more “worthy” of good health or that I think smokers “deserve what they get” (because they don’t, by the way). I tell you this because the diagnosis of lung cancer came entirely out of the blue, the mother of all sandbags.
It started as a cough in the spring of 2005. Ironically, I was coughing, too. We thought nothing of it because, if both of us are coughing, it must be a cold, right? At worst, it must be some sort of mold or dust in the house, right? Wrong. My coughing was the result of a weird but well-known side effect of blood pressure medication and once it was adjusted, my coughing disappeared.
John’s coughing continued. Like a good patient, he went to the doctor early. He took antibiotics. He tried an inhaler. The doctor discussed adult onset asthma and other problems that could cause coughing. Because my husband is a never-smoker, because he doesn’t eat red meat and because he jogs a couple of miles two or three times a week, no one ever thought about cancer.
The coughing continued through the summer. It was a pain the ass but did not effect him until around August when it made jogging in San Francisco next to impossible. Then, in August, he had difficulty making it up a flight of stairs without losing his breath. Still, we never dreamed it could be cancer. We learned later that cancer had been disregarded because John was not in pain and had not lost weight.
Finally, in late September, John went back to the doctor with his new symptom (shortness of breath). The doctor scheduled a chest x-ray. We got a call later that day asking us to come in to the office the next day. I was thinking pneumonia, severe bronchial infection, even Legionnaire’s Disease but not cancer.
Our regular doctor was unavailable. We were shown into an examination room (which I know from past experience is not soundproof) and in walked a very young doctor. He told John, “Your x-rays reveal an opacity.” What the heck does that mean? He went on to talk about further tests and I said, “Wait a minute. Are you saying he has a tumor?” When the doctor responded, “yes,” I asked, “As in cancer?” “Yes.” “Well, how do we tell if it’s malignant?” “More tests.”
We left with little knowledge but an appoint for a follow-on echocardiogram the next day. We are lucky (and you do come to understand that lucky is a relative term). We have insurance that put us in one of the top cancer hospitals in the U.S.
The next day, John reported for his echocardiogram. I waited in the family waiting room catching up on my all-important People magazine deficit while an orderly took John to a changing room and on to the sonogram. The next thing I know, I have made it through a year’s worth of dog-eared cast-off magazines and still no John. After approaching the nurse’s station, I see John, fully dressed, trundling down the hall. The nurse asked us to wait. We spot the x-ray technician and the nurse in an intimate chat, glancing over at us.
The technician came back over to us and asked us to wait. He said he wanted to have the sonogram results reviewed by a specialist. We waited. Finally, a doctor and the technician came back and told us that John had to be checked into the hospital immediately. He had an enlarged heart.
We learned our first new cancer word that day: Tamponade. Sounds more like a Moroccan marinade than anything you should be worried about. The nurse who helped John onto a stretcher to transport him from the testing area to the emergency room admissions kept asking him, “Are you sure you are not in pain?” That really got us going.
While John was in emergency observation, I had to leave to meet the school bus. At home, I made my first cancer discovery: the Internet can be your friend and your worst enemy. It can tell you everything you need to know. It can also induce panic.
By cruising Web M.D. and the Mayo Clinic site (both excellent sources for general information), I learned that Cardiac Tamponade is an emergency situation where the pericardium (the sack that holds the heart) becomes full of liquid. The sack gets so full that the heart cannot expand. Trust me, even if you don’t know how the heart works, it has to expand in order to beat. (In lay terms, the heart expands and contracts to push blood around the body. If it cannot expand, it cannot contract, blood doesn’t move; stroke or other dire consequences ensue).
“Okay, he’s in the emergency room. That’s a good thing,” I thought to myself. It can be handled. I began to calm down until I read the causes, which included “end-stage” breast and lung cancer. Needless to say, I got a sitter and beat-feet back to the hospital. I did not, also needless to say, discuss this diagnosis with John.
We did not hear the words “cancer” or “lung cancer” for another week. I will tell you about our hospital stay in my next post.
Related posts:
- DOCTOR TALK This section is dedicated to compiling a list of all of the things we must ask our doctor while we have his or her attention....
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