Jump to content

shelliemacs

Members
  • Posts

    1,305
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by shelliemacs

  1. Well I made it to NY and my friend is really beat up. They took the lobe out through a slit under her shoulder blade in the back. I was blown away. I guess I assumed they would cut her chest and that the lungs were lower than they actually are. She is in allot of pain and she does not know yet that they want to go back in when she heals from this surgery and remove the middle wedge in the other lung. Her husband says right now if her told her, she would choose not to do it. So he isn't telling her that yet. I will be here through sunday to let her husband go to work and get things done that they have not been able to do. any advice on how to take care of her? pain wise, comfort wise? food wise?
  2. Joe she will be 52 in June of this year. Gail, THIRD PRIMARY, holy camoly. I never knew one puts you at higher risk of another. I guess they were so aggressive due to the frequency of her getting new cancers. Her ovarian was june 2005. her skin was november 2007 and february 2008 is Lung. I wanted her to come here to recouperate in the warmth but she cant fly yet. She cant sit in the sun. and she is afraid to be away from the states and a hospital. this is just boggling to my mind.
  3. OK so here i sit in the beautiful carribean having thought It was all behind me. Watching the sun and thinking for all the sadness I am truly blessed to be where I am. then the other shoe drops again. My neighbor back in NY, she was my moms best friend, and her husband was my dads best friend. They had lived next door to my parents since 1984 and when I moved into mom and dads house after they passed in 2004 through 2007 they were my neighbors and stand in parents. She had ovarian cancer in 2005, skin cancer in 2007, and this past monday I got the call that its now Lung cancer. She never smoked, abused alachol or drugs, never overate or baked herself in the sun. You could say she hid from the fun things in life in way. Well I dont have specs and maybe someone here can help me out. Its a slow growing, low grads (whats that mean) cancer of the lung. Its not a metastis of the ovarian or skin cancer. Its new. It was spotted on scans back to 2006 but never picked up by the radiologists. The thorasic surgeon pulled all scans and said he saw it back from those scans after her ovarian cancer. the left lower lobe has a 9 millimeter legion. the right lung has a 6 millimeter legion. monday they removed the left lower lobe. when she heals they will go back in a do the same in the right middle lobe. questions: how many lobes can you loose and live a relatively normal life. what does low grade cancer mean anyone have any experiance with this? oh and they are saying after they cut it out no chemo or radiation will be required, but my concern with that is she has had 3 PET scans and these legions NEVER lit up. it was only after a biopsy that the dx was given. IF the cancer never lit up, how can any doctor be sure there isn't other cancer that is not lighting up.? I have no experiance with slow growing low grade stuff, moms was non small cell that grew like weeds and dads was small cell that was out of control. I am truly stunned that again lc is in my life and that this person has had three different cancers in 4 years. any imput would be great . I am flying back to the states next week to help her out when she gets home from the hospital. shelly
  4. Hey Chick, CONGREATULATIONS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! now come down here and I will make you the most delicious margarita on the beach with the warm sun on your face and have the waves crashing at your feet. Thrilled for you! Shelly
  5. Hello everyone. It has been a few months since my last post but I have been busy. I moved with pretty much the clothes on my back to St. Thomas USVI in October of 07. I have taken my retirement 30+ years early and left my stiffling desk job for a drink slinging gig at a beach bar. its always warm here, no snow, but there is a rainy season. But with a cold salted margarita a little rain can fall and whowould know it. My sister has had a recourrance of her cancer but she is having surgery in February so I will fly back to be with her then. Since mom and dad passed I have learned a hard lesson to live today like I wont be here tomorrow. I also found out my 17 year old nephew who went through his own medical crisis last january has started SMOKING and I thought for sure watching his grandparents die from LC would have scared him so much that he never would have though of smoking. So I am playing Auntie tough love and am going to bring him here for his school break and work him like a dog so he never has time or money to smoke. with my sister falling apart again I have to do whatever I can to keep this boy from one day in his future from getting LC too. I have had enough of that disease to last me forever. SO if anyone ever takes a cruise or a flight down here. I work for the Palms Court Bar and we serve the best Margaritas this side of Cabo Wabo. Miss you all and May there be a cure one day soon. Shelliemacs
  6. shelliemacs

    Roll Call...

    Hi Everyone, I check the board every few months but without being a active caretaker anymore, I am not sure what to post. My sister is in remission again and doing well. It will be 4 years since I lost mom on 8/15/2007 and we just had dads 3 year anniversary on June 8. I lost my best friend Jack, my pet dwarf holland lop bunny, on June 14 and I took a few weeks to greive him as well. Otherwise...My house is on the market and I am moving to the island of St Barts. I have decided to sell everything I own and start my retirement, 30 years early. I saved everything mom and dad left me and after I sell my house and car, I can move and find a nice tiny apartment and sling drinks at a beach bar if I have to so I can get the rent paid and load up on peanut butter and jelly sandwhiches. I have finially realized life is WAY TO SHORT to not wake up with the sun coming up over the horizon and watching it set in the ocean every night. I am seeking Joy, chasing Happiness, searchinig for peace...still. But "time" does have a way of scabbing over wounds and I will carry my parents with me wherever I go. I still run for cancer research. I finished three marathons last year raising $5400.00 in sponsorship to my local ACS. I read lately that now oncologists are looking at "Anti-inflamatory medications to coincide with standard cancer drug therapys in patients. I guess its supposed to possible help supress how quickly aggressive cancers grow and spread. I read how inflamation somehow is a catalyst for cancer growing at faster rates. So this subject interests me allot. One study I read today was about a woman who refused treatments but hospice care is giving her anti inflamatory drugs to both ease pain and try to slow her cancer growth. She is one year post dx and still relatively stable. anyhoo. thats me and I am still on the life bus hitting a few pot holes here and there. I hope and pray for all of you every day and ache for a cure to this hell. Mucho hugs and love to you all. Shelliemacs
  7. I am stunned speachless. I cant believe the amount of LC cases that are coming out of nowhere!!! Today. I found out three more people, 2 I know dearly and yet another I am related to have been diagonosed with lung Cancer. 1 at stage 3b and the other 2 at stage 4. My cousin who is 45 thought she was having a heart attack. she was rushed in and they said no heart attack. its pneumonia,,,,,long story short, the fluid they drained ....filled with cancer cells. more tests....stage 3b NSC lung cancer. my next door neighbor....found out yesturday. Stage 4 LC given 6 months without treatment on the high side. My best friends grandfather stage 4 with about 3 months time frame approx. What scares me is this doesnt effect me now like it did when it was mom and dad and my father in law. they only lasted 3 - 6 months and I look at theses 3 new people and I see them gone in less than 6 months. I talk to them about treatments and hope all the while my mind is telling me to prepare for their funerals. LC is a thief. it robs the patient, the family, the friends but mostly it robs one's soul. It takes away your innocence and leaves a nasty burning hole inside. You can never go back from pre-LC in your life. It will never be the happy-no worry's life it once was. no real reason for my rant. I just wanted to Bi-ch out loud. I think i need a labotomy to give up my glass half empty, no silver lining, lights dont work on the brightside, synical self now.
  8. shelliemacs

    Ray A

    I too remember ray. I am so very sorry. I know he loved his family very much and am so sorry for your loss.
  9. I take xanax and it saves my sanity. I have three different doses and take the does depending how bad my anxiety/panic is. I would never push it on anyone, but it just quitely and calmly pulls me back from the edge. I am able to sleep while on it and I can handle my anxiety.
  10. my deepest sympathies.
  11. Hi everyone, I know I have been absent for a long time. Just trying to keep my sister going and cope with life's ups and downs. quick update, my sister has only two chemo's left on her second go round with breast cancer. Keeping fingers crossed. anyhoo here is where I need help. my nephew, my sisters son, is 16. two weeks ago he passed out in gym class. he was like elmers glue he was so white when the nurse brought him out in a wheelchair to my sisters car. He also had a terrible headache and his right leg was painful above the knee and numb below the knee. a few days later he fealt better so he went back to school. this past monday 1/15 he woke up with a severe headache again and since it was a school holiday he went back to bed. tuesday he got up for school and in the shower he was so dizzy and his head pain was so bad he had to sit in the shower. my sister let him stay home again from school. tuesday night the pain was so awful she took him to an urgent care facility and they rushed him to a hospital thinking meningitis. they did a cat scan and labs and they were both negative. we have not had a lumbar puncture done on him yet because of the pain lever involved in it. today he saw three more doctors who made more guesses and friday he has a MRI of the head scheduled. they say its a gentler way to confirm or rule out meningitis again. the wierd thing is his feet are now freezing. they are like ice. we put 4 pairs of socks on him and wrapped his feet and they are still cold, so cold to the touch. his head pain is between 7-9 out of 10 even with meds. does anyone have any avenues i can research? i have been on the internet for three days and to google headache and freezing feet is getting me no where. love to all shelY ok, the kid woke up with no pain and went to school, 1 hour later he was on the floor again. cant remember how he got there, doesn't know if he passed out or just sat down, has no memory of it. my sister and i took him to childrens hospital and the quarinteened him and kicked my sister out due to her diminished immune system so i stayed with him. they did the spinal tap and gave him a pain cockatil through IV he was asleep in 2 minutes. i thanked above for his pain being gone. 4 hours later the spinal tap was negative and now were waiting on an MRI in the morning to see if its an aneyrysm or something else in the brain the cat scan missed. urgghhh ok. we have a dx. he has a Chiari Malformation of the cerebellum of his brain. He is Level 1 and i am reading how thats the level to be if you have this. Surgery is the only real treatment to remove a piece of the skull and medication can reduce the symptoms like pain and balance problems and things like that.. we see a neuro surgeon thursday to see what he needs to have done. I guess people with level 1 most times dont know they have this because the symptoms mimick migraine headaches. knowing is good, now we can fight it.
  12. I set myself up for this disapointment. I believed, I believed finially that the all mighty or my mom or my dad or my step dad were really in a place called heaven and heard my silent prayers that I said in the dark every night through tears that my sister would be the one person in my family to beat cancer and not die on me. I believed that my parents bodies were not simply in the ground under 5 feet of rocks and dirt but yet their souls were up in heaven living out wonderful lives and young and beautiful and happy and were able to look down on us and make sure we would be ok cause they were looking out for us down here from heaven. I believed they could go to GOD and say hey they lost all three of us, cant we give them a pass on any heartache for a while. Like say 25 years. I begged my mother last week while driving home in my car from work to make it be ok again. to not make my sisters cancer be back or worse or spread. I told her I would never doubt again if she could talk to god and make this happen. Well it did NOT happen and I know now I was fooling myself all along. People should only be allowed to have so much heartache, pain, suffering and grief thrust upon them. Me and my sister have had our fair share and its someone else's turn. Some mean people, some famous person, some rich person, anyone else but us. Its not fair anymore. I don't know yet how bad my sister is. A tumor showed up on her chest wall now and we wont know until wednesday if its a met or new cancer or cancer at all. I am a fool for holding onto any sort of hope. Its false and fake and only leaves you with more cracks in an already broken heart. We only get bad news in this family, never the good kind. so for me to believe even for a minute second that its not gonna be bad is stupid and foolish. My husband says in the last year I have gotten meaner and more short with people, expecially him. He says I jump at things I never did before and dont forgive anymore. I take more moods out on him and hold grudges longer. I just realized tonight why, I am different. I am less filled with hope, faith, forgiveness, goodness or kindness. I see the glass 3/4 empty now and expect the worst in people and situations. I dont expect kindness from people and probably dont give it back either. I know why now I am what he says I am. Cancer has changed me and the failure of the faith my parents brought me up to believe in has been exposed as a non-esistant truth in my eyes. Every time you kick someone they get up a little slower and my god have I been kicked in the last 3 years. I am not getting up anymore at all. I refuse too. I dont have what it takes to fight back or even stand my ground anymore. I am better off staying down here on the ground and to give up on living, and just start existing rather than try again and again and keep getting kicked. whats worse, tonight after yet another argument with my husband he said he probably could not take much more of this marriage if I could not change a little even. My response, "You can't hurt me by leaving me. I have been left three times already in the last 3 years and by people who were my family! Your not family your a legal union that you can walk away from anytime. My family could not divorce me and if I can survive them dying and never seeing them again in my life you think you walking away from me and still being alive is gonna hurt?! family is birth to grave and you weren't there in the beginning and you probably wont be there in the end. whats sad is that is really the truth and how I feel. I never realized how much cancer took, not only my parents and cousin and father in law and probably one day my sister too, but it took my soul, the best of what I was, the stuff that made me who I was. Now I am nothing more than a shell. A soul less shell where there once beat a caring kind heart. sorry for the long wind-edness. I am just broken.
  13. Andrea, I don't know what to say. Are they saying Cancer??? I am angry for you and with you. What is the next step, Surgery?
  14. Andrea, I dont know who is gonna end up in a padded room faster you because of both your parents and now your own cancer/possible cancers or me cause of my family's cancers. I can't think we have done something so horrible for the universe to target some people so much and mean people so little. I will send all my prayers for your negative results while I send them up to my parents for my sisters negative results as well. Some day we will be rewarded for sure. shelly
  15. gosh i thought i had worn my tee shirt for the last time. first mom, then dad, then sisters dx...remission and now its back DAMMITTTTTTT!!!!!!!!! I told my husband I could not go through it again. I have had enough. I am done with cancer. THis time I really may go to the looney ward. why is this family being cancer targeted!!!!!!!!!!!
  16. Ok, I feel perfectly about chiming in on this one since I lived it too. My bio dad died when I was 9, my mom remarried 3 years later and I had a great step dad for 21 years. mom died august of 2003 and my father fell off the earth in the hole of depression. I could not bear seeing his pain so I encouraged him to find someone to spend time with, have dinner with, converse with, share pain with, It made me feel like I could have a life as well if my step father was not alone. I fealt comfort knowing he may someday smile again. sadly my step dad was dx'd with lung cancer 3 months after moms death and died 6 months later. I lost them both in 9 months. at dads funeral a woman approached me who dad met at a grief group. she cried over him quitely and I knew that she was the one dad connected with even for a little bit over their mutual grief. I was glad he had someone to open up with about his pain. without sounding mean. i think its cruel to expect someone to stay alone for a acceptable amount of time just so it looks good. your step dad lived hell over your moms illness and death. let him ease his pain with someone who can make him smile. it will never be the smile your mom gave him, but none the less, he is not crying. live and let live. shelly just my opinion
  17. Oh Don I am so unbelieveably sorry. I have been out of the country and I am just getting to read this today (Sunday).. I am so very very very sorry. I really can't think of proper words to say to express how sincerely sorry I am.
  18. Andrea, has there been a radon test on your patents home? I am just wondering because both of my parents had LC as well at the same time, (we just didn't get dads dx until after moms passing.) And before we moved in here we had a radon test done on the house. Now there could have been other factors as well. Mom worked in a building full of asbestos and dad worked in a metal foundry and who knows whats floating in the air there. just asking...
  19. my husband and I were stationed at Incirlik AFB in Turkey. I was sent back to the US 5 days later and he was sent back to King Fahd AFB in Saudi Arabia the same day. He spent 14 months in IRAQ and I lived in fear all that time. Shelly
  20. Don and Lucie continued prayers being said. Lucie is a fighter, she can beat this back.
  21. Your post made me cry too. missing them is awful. grieveing them is unbearable. Remembering the good times is priceless. Shelly
  22. Ok chick I have ridden on that exact same bus. Whats ironic is my sister, who must be a clone of your sister, is named Kathleen. Wow what a twist of fate. My sister, to this day, says moms death was harder on her than on me because she lived physicially closer to her. I did move away after I got married for 12 years. I moved home 7 months before mom's dx and I moved into her house to take constant care of her after her dx until she passed. I left my job on a family leave and emptied my savings to pay her co-pays and help my dad with bills without moms income. Then I bought mom's house and paid the mortgage so dad could keep living there without having to pay the bills. I was his constant companion until his death 9 months after moms from LC as well. BUT my sister still to this day my sister acts as if she is the more wounded and more devestated. She never once helped my father during his illness. not one load of laundry, not once holding his head while he vomited from chemo. Not once cleaning out her wallet to pay for meds, not once cooking a meal, not once listening to his heart tear out over my moms death. BUT OH at his funeral she sat in the first chair and put on a waterworks show of unbelieveable proportions. I know she was acting and I have peace because I know I did everything I could do and did do. If my sister is not the center of attention then all around her will suffer the consequences. Believe me I know what being kicked by family means, I truly understand what your feeling. But let me leave you with one piece of advice....forget them...You will live with your decisions and have peace in your life. You will know that even after your mom passes over to her next stage of life that you did absolutely everything you could do and your mom wanted those exact same choices. You wont ever have any regrets or what if's running around in your head. Its your siblings who will have them and doubts in their own heads. Hold your head high, your a fantastic daughter and your mom knows it. have peace my friend....shelly
  23. I just read in our paper today that Suzanne Pleshette has been diagonosed with Lung Cancer. The article did not say which type, but rather that it was found early and progonosis is good. they said it was found at the size of a grain of sand. She is being treated in Los Angeles Cedar Sinai Hospital.
  24. Amanda, welcome. Its a terrible thing you having to find us. BUT, there is so much hope and love here. that amount of shrinkage is fantastic. you should be thrilled. brain met, shmane met. those buggers can be zapped with radiation and be taken down quickly. your dads stage is survivable for many many years. Just keep an agressive oncologist on your side and get real good nutrition in your dad. My mom and dad had LC. Mom had NSC and dad had SC. sadle I lost them both 9 months apart because their cancers were just too advanced and agressive. dad did not want to live without mom anyway and did not have the fight in him. my sister also is a Breast cancer survivor and is two years into dx and just got married two weeks ago and is still in remission. please do me a favor, around your dad...LIVE. I treated mom and dad as if they were helpless and I think I contributed to them giving up. I did everything and took their "adultness" away from them in a way. dad is sick yes. but not gone. He still has to feel needed and viable. never ever give up the fight shelly
  25. Carleen, in the middle of your despair you can still smile at things you and keith found humor in. you have shown just a spec of what you still have inside. Keith is with you and trying to help you out of your despair. hang on to that spec.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.