wiesia
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Posts posted by wiesia
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Aaron,
Here are some tricks my mother uses. She has mets to L4 and also herniated disc at L1.
Stretching: lay on the floor and put your legs on the sit of a chair. Your thighs should be at the right angle to your spine. Your knees also locked at 90%.
While sleeping: sleep on your stomach, one leg straight, the other bent with the knee pulled towards your chin. It helps her.
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How wonderful !!!!!
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spicysashimi is taking it
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Which lung was it ? Healthy lung would show dark, no ? It is the other parts: heart, arteries etc that show white. My brother, after one of the Dr visits,
was trying to convince me that the superior vena cava was my father's tumor. Tells you how people listen to doctors when they are all in nerves.
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Randy, many thanks for posting that. Another warning about using untested approaches to treatment.
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Amanda,
I am so sorry to hear that. My father had it as well
though doctors are not sure whether that was what killed him. It was terrifying to watch the speed at which SOB was getting worse and worse. His left lung was commpromised and the spread was in the right lung. At some point the right lung basically shut down. He lived a week from that time. It is still my belief that the doctors could have possibly "open up" the left lung if they tried harder but ... I will never know.
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I liked that piece as well !
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I have a similar story. When I was a postdoc at the University of Chicago (math department) there was a woman there with leukiemia. She just got her PhD, a job at Princeton and was busy writing this paper that has eventually appeared in the number one math journal. When she was not doing math she played soccer with math-women group. I could not believe that she died few days after I have seen her copying and polishing her paper in the copy room.
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Keeping my fingers crossed.
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Long warm bath works for me. You have to get a good timing though: if you stay too long in the water you get dehydrated. A good sign of dehydration is your hands getting "wrinkled".
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I am with Ernie on that. Why to be in a trial at all ? Insurance should cover both Tarceva and Avastin.
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I also share your frustration. My mother is a six year breast cancer survivar and when she got sick there was so many places and very active message boards I could go to for information and support.
When my father was sick the situation was completely different. One obvious aspect is the dismal prognosis. People with lung cancer live for such a short time and waste away so fast that you just do not see many survivors fighting for lung cancer research, funding, etc. It is all up to the families it seems.
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O Gosh ! I am schocked to hear that and so very very sorry. I hate this disease !
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Amanda,
I will be hoping for a quick recovery from the pneumonia.
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I will be hoping for the best news !
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It looks like Karen had only one type of chemo (besides Tarceva). There are plenty more. The usual second line chemos are: taxotere, alimta, navelbine.
The first two are stronger; the last one has minimal side effects.
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My parents live on the outskirts of the city where many of the city gardens are located. You see those all over Europe: tiny parcels of land where people
grow flowers and vegetables and have a tiny house
to spend their summer evenings around away from the city noise. As a result there are zillions of wild cats around. My mother was taking care of some 20-30 of them for the last twenty years. My father built them a house. This is an extension of our house so it has heat and water. They spent their winter in that house. Wild cats, even vacinated, are so prone to diseases, accidents that it is unbelievable. So death is a constant companion. Cats, when they are sick, just get depressed, more and more. They withdraw, hide somewhere, get quiet, and one day they are just gone. I always thought that the nature told them to give up. Not to accept it but to give up: since cure was so unlikely, death had to come.
Terribly sad.
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Barb,
I have seen him promoting that book as well. He says that our spirit=mind=thought="who knows what" lives on. I wonder about that. There is a fellow who appeared on larry king once and people were calling with names of relatives who passed. He was able to see them and to report some messages from them. I found it interesting because the messages were too much for a coincidence. A father told a son that they have put a wrong brand of cigarettes into his coffin. How can this be a coincidence ? The fellow
says that he knows nothing of the other world or of what he sees. He does not understand in what sense the people he sees are alive. Perhaps they do live on
independantly in our thoughts ? I have found it really thought provoking. More so than any religious belief I know of.
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I am so sorry Heather.
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I am not religious (but raised Catholic). And I have no idea whether any type of "us" survives after our body is gone. My best guess at the moment would be "no". And it really bothers me. Thinking that my father, all he was, is gone forever and ever is unbearable.
My best friend died last fall; just before my father was found to have lung cancer. She died from pancreatic cancer, only seven weeks after the diagnosis. She was not religious either (raised Mormon). She was not afraid of death, just angry that she was dying at 64. Just before her death she said: "I am confident that there is something waiting for me beyond an emptiness". I thought it strange. But ...
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Nicole,
I am terribly sorry.
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will keep my fingers crossed.
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Did they check whether there is a tumor/enlarged lymph nodes in the mediastinum ? Those can constrict trachea and the main bronchus. Also, a tumor might be inside the airway. I am not sure that that would show up on an x-ray.
At the end my father could not breath. I still can not believe that he is gone: his scans showed tumors in the lungs but there was plenty of lungs left to breath. I do believe that there was an obstruction in some airway that they did not find. But who knows...it is a terrible disease and maybe his shortness of breath was caused by something we just could not eaily see.
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Rochelle,
Mets to shin are not common. And it is good that x-ray came out ok. But I wanted to make a remark here
that some women made to me some months ago and it really helped my mother. Generally, bone mets are not
going to show on x-ray unless there is already a 50% or more destruction of the bone. We have seen it ourselves. That is my mother found out that last september that her PET scan lit up on one rib (she had breat cancer five years before that). SUV was 3.
Her onc ordered x-ray. It showed nothing and my mother was so happy. Well... when women at the breast cancer support group told me to get MRI or bone scan we did. And it turned out that her rib is actually quite damaged from cancer. Good news is that
we are able to control it with femara.
But rib is a common site for met but shin is not...
What happens after a clinical trial?
in CAREGIVER RESOURCE CENTER
Posted
Trial is just treated as another treatment. There could be other options after that. Yes, it is true that many trials would not accept patients which were on too many lines of chemo, for example.
Yes, unfortunately, patients do run out of options.
One scary thing about lung cancer vs other cancers is the speed at which it grows. And the general deterioration of patient's body it causes. Often it is not even the question whether another option exists (because in theory it does) but whether patient is well enough to even consider it.