Hello everyone, I've been lurking these forums for a little bit and decided to join. My 26-year-old boyfriend was diagnosed in October with stage IV NSCLC, primary tumor in mediastinum (12 cm, covering entire upper lobe of his right lung.. it was huge) with bone mets to L3 and L5 on his spine, mixed adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma. It all started with him having severe back pain along with some coughing and shortness of breath. His back pain ended up getting so severe that he went to the ER.. when they x-rayed his chest they realized that his right lung had almost completely collapsed (it ended up collapsing completely) and then after doing a CT scan on him, realized he had a 12 cm tumor in his mediastinum. He also ended up developing superior vena cava syndrome from the tumor pushing on his SVC, impeding blood flow to his heart and causing his heart to beat too fast. He was in the hospital for almost 2 weeks.. they couldn't release him until they could remove his chest tube and his vitals normalized.
When he was in the hospital, they first told us he had stage IV lung cancer.. then turned around and said he probably had testicular cancer. I was so relieved because testicular cancer has a much higher cure rate than lung cancer. I'm not sure why they had such a tough time figuring out what kind of cancer he had - cancer cell pathology should be pretty cut-and-dried. However, shortly before they released him from the hospital they told him he did have "some form" of lung cancer (gotta love vague doctors). They started him on chemo and chest radiation in the hospital immediately, even before they were sure what kind of cancer he had. I guess it took them so long to dx his lung cancer because it was so unlikely that someone his age would have lung cancer.. but it does happen.
Chris is doing better though - he will be receiving his 4th round of chemo (cisplatin and taxotere) next Tuesday (12-6-11). I think they want to do between 4 and 6 rounds of chemo - preferably 6. He also had 10 radiation treatments to his chest which burnt his esophagus pretty badly.. he could barely even drink water for almost 2 weeks because it was so painful but that has healed up great. The CT scan he had on 11-10-11 showed that his chest tumor had shrunk over 50% - from 12 cm down to 4.3 cm!! His oncologist also said his lungs look great. However, he also said that it looked like his spinal lesions had increased in number, which we thought didn't make sense because his back pain has gotten so much better - he was in total agony when he was in the hospital and right after he was discharged from the hospital, his back pain pretty much went away. In the past 5 days or so, he's been getting weird pain in his arm (pain that seems to jump around, from his upper to his lower arm, which is odd - if it were a bone met you would think the pain would be only in one place) and more back discomfort so I'm pretty worried about that. His oncologist is already looking for clinical trials he may qualify for in the event his current chemo protocol isn't working as well as we would like.
It's been just a little over 2 months now since this unwanted journey began.. it seems like it's been the longest 2 months of my life. We had only been dating since July when everything happened, really hit it off perfectly, fell for each other very hard and then to find out Chris has stage IV lung cancer was absolutely devastating to me. But God's timing is always perfect and as hard as this has been for me emotionally, I know that I was meant to come into Chris' life at this particular time because I know he needs me. I know the statistics for stage IV lung cancer but I do believe in a miracle for him. And Chris is just so amazingly positive about everything, he said from the very beginning, ever since he was first diagnosed, he's just not been very worried about it.. he knows everything is going to be okay and that something good is going to come out of this. I probably worry more about him than he himself does!
Anyway, sorry this was so long!