Of course, the hope was to surgically remove the abscess and the tumor and be done with the whole lung problem. But, conditions had to be perfect for that to work out. When are conditions ever perfect?
The infected area was too big, connected to too many things and too close to the tumor, and the tumor was too close to arteries feeding blood to the lung. So, any attempt to remove anything by surgery would have killed me; or at least the odds were in the 80 and above range. Whew! That'll make your face pale. We stepped back for another assessment.
Never the less I ended up in surgery today for a biopsy of the offending infection. It was an identical procedure that I went through in November to get the biopsy of the tumor, except this time Dr. Ho went through the front. "They" said that I wouldn't be totally anesthetized (damn that spell checker is great!). But, I was put to sleep because I didn't feel a thing and didn't want to. They even said I coughed. And, if I coughed without knowing it, then I was totally anesthetized. You have to experience one of these coughs to know that it racks your body and you grow to hate them.
They kept me around long enough to make sure the procedure hadn't left any unwanted holes in my lung, and that my lung was going to seal up on its own. Then, they sent me home. So, now we will wait again for the identity of the infection so we can feed it its medicine, make it go away and then get on with chemo. The rate we're going, we may start chemo in March. Chris is having fits at how slow Kaiser is, although you can't really blame them, and she's nagging me to death when there's nobody else around to complain to. If you hear of an old man jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, you'll know the chemo problem is solved.
Dave
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