Hi all – for anyone who is interested in the nitty gritty details of the lung surgery, read on. The surgery went exactly as expected. Last Monday (6/15) I checked into the hospital, met with all the doctors and then was wheeled into surgery. It’s so bizarre how I literally can’t remember a THING about going into surgery. I guess that’s not a bad thing. I was under for about 30 minutes with a breathing tube (so I had a sore throat after the surgery). The surgeon made two incisions in my right side, a camera went in one and the tube went in the other. He then sprayed (no joke!) the talc throughout the lung lining. While he was in my lung he also took a biopsy so we could get a look at the cancer within my lung lining (which we haven’t done in the past).
After surgery I was taken to my room and slowly recovered. I was on a LOT of pain meds (diladid) so I felt okay. Usually I get sick after being put under, but my doc gave me enough anti-nausea meds that I felt okay. The tube from my side was pretty big and continually removed fluid from my lung while I was in the hospital for the 4 days. I was hooked up to an IV and the tube, so in order to go to the bathroom or walk around I had to haul around both my IV and my tube suction machine. Not fun.
The first night in the hospital was real rough. I started throwing up around midnight, which made my heartbeat jack up to about 140 beats/min (normal is about 60-70) and my oxygen saturation got pretty low. That made them call a code on me and a rapid response team rushed to my room. I had a TINY room, so to have 8 doctors and nurses in there at one time was quite a feat. They gave me an EKG and chest xrays and determined I wasn’t in any immediate cardiac distress. The whole thing was a bit of a blur to me and I just remember wanting to sleep and to stop being poked and prodded.
By Wednesday there was no more fluid draining from my tube so I was able to get the tube removed. Which was awesome in that I didn’t have a gigantic tube coming out of me but it hurt SO SO SO BAD to get it removed. They gave me 3 doses of diladid (which is just a shit ton of pain meds) and then yanked it out. ahhhh!!! It only hurt for about 3 seconds, but that was a long 3 seconds. I was still struggling with a rapid heartbeat and lower oxygen saturation, so I had to stay in the hospital through Thursday. But finally Thursday evening I was cleared to go home. I’ve never been so happy to sleep in my own bed and have a long shower!
What I haven’t written about yet is that the latest chemo I was on (eribulin) is not working. We did a CT scan before surgery which showed two more tumors in my liver. So yet again another chemo has failed after only a few months. So now I’m going to try a new combination of iBrance and Femera. IBrance was just approved in February by the FDA and shows a ton of promise. The doctor we met with in LA helped discover it. So we’ll see. I’m feeling pretty dishearten by all the set backs we’ve had lately and would love if we could find a medication that would work. Maybe this will be the magic combination. I guess we’ll know in 3 months when I have my next scan.
Thank you all for your well wishes and good thoughts over the past two weeks while I dealt with this lung surgery. My breathing is slowly getting back to normal and I’m taking walks every day to help expand my lung, so I’m definitely feeling like this surgery was the right action to take for my lung issues.
I’ll keep you all updated on the new mediations. Wish for good luck there! love, M