Back from Mexico

Little did I dream when I left for Mexico May 23 that I would end up spending as much time in the hospital upon my return as I did south of the border. I left on a Tuesday and felt fine (although it was at the crack of dawn), but by Saturday was becoming short of breath with any type of exertion. I attributed it to the heat and humidity, and possibly to the pollution in Puerto Vallarta, but it got worse every day, and by Tuesday, June 3, when we were to fly home, just rolling my carryon from my bedroom to the front ot the apartment made me feel completely winded. I needed wheelchairs to get through the airports in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico City, and O'Hare.

My downstairs neighbor helped me with my luggage, and I barely made it up the two flights of stairs to my apartment. I phoned the pulmonology night line at Northwestern Mem. Hospital, and someone phoned me back 15 minutes later telling me to come directly to the ER. So at 10 p.m., having eaten nothing but airport and airplane food all day, I grabbed a 6-inch subway on the way down to the ER, driven by my intrepid and very helpful neighbor. It was a strange night in Chicago, spooky and extremely foggy, but we eventually found the ER entrance and by 2 a.m. or so I was being wheeled up to a fantastic corner room on the 15th floor of the new Prentice Women's Hospital. Floors 14-16 are dedicated to oncology patients. I had a very bad night the rest of the night, and the following morning they drained a liter of fluid from my lungs. Considerably more fluid remained, but it can't be drained too quickly or the lung does something bad, I forget what. I think maybe Thursday they did a procedure called something like pleurecentesis, which was to stick three catheters into the space between the lungs and the chest wall and drain the fluid. When they tested the fluid, they found metastatic cancer cells. They theorize that last winter, when I was diagnosed, there was a sprinkling of malignant cells in the pleura, like a sugar coating, that didn't show up on the images. Those cells grew and started emitting fluid, and the rest is history. Ultimately they drained 4 liters from my pleura, and then did a procedure that essentially glues the lung back into place in the chest wall so that fluid won't be able to build up there in the future. I came home this afternoon to a huge pile of snail mail, hundreds of emails, and a house with no food. My friends have been wonderful, however, and someone's bringing dinner over tonight--the lovely Nancy Gardner, who's a great cook.

The plan is to recover from these procedures, gain back some strength, and get a CT scan in a couple of weeks to see whats happening inside my lungs. A secondary issue is tissue damage caused by radiation treatment, which was depositing some fluid inside the lungs, not beyond them in the pleura. The treatment for radiation pneumonitis is massive doses of steroids, so they're going to put that off for a while and hope that now that the fluid has been drained the inflammation will calm down.

Now I really feel like a lung cancer patient, I'll tell you. They sent me home with a couple of oxygen tanks, and a home care company will bring a home oxygen machine over tonight between 6-9. I was supposed to have been discharged last night, but the doc who examined me just before I was to leave was concerned about swelling in my legs and ordered another test that couldn't be performed until this morning. The Doppler study showed there is, in fact, a blood clot in my right calf, so i will have to give myself shots of blood thinnner twice a day.

Fortunately, my antidepressants starting kicking in whhile I was in Mexico, so my mental health is reasonably good, considering wht's going on. That's it for now. I'll write again tomorrow with details of Mexico trip. xox