Medical Adventures with Lung Cancer Girl: Part I

January 6, 2022

Preface

On the surface, this post may not seem like a story about lung cancer. But the body changes with this disease. Perhaps I should say, the body changes with the treatments for cancer. I think this post, and the two to follow, are about living with what happens after treatment. For me, “after treatment” is just another part of the story of my cancer.

Sunday Surprise

We’d just returned from several days on the Oregon coast. (Happy New Year!) I was squatting at the  freezer downstairs to fish out something for dinner. As I struggled to keep the wrapped chicken from sliding out and bouncing across the room, I noticed that squatting felt…weird.  I couldn’t get as low as usual. Why? I bounced a little, then I realized both of my calves larger than normal. What the…? Envisioning embolisms, I shoved the chicken back on its shelf, slammed the door and ran upstairs. The family medical group convened and quickly came to consensus: yep, my calves were swollen, and yep, I had to call someone. But who? I settled on the oncologists, because blood clots that start in the legs usually wind up in the lungs– I had already had one pulmonary embolism to prove that. 

Dr. Oncologist-On-Call was a lovely man. I gave him my history– lung cancer, pneumonitis, pulmonary embolism, yada yada– and told him I had no other symptoms except that my legs felt like fat sausages (the kind waiting to burst through their skins on the grill. But I didn’t say that part.) After some back and forth, he acknowledged as to how he was baffled about what might be going on. Embolisms might start in the leg, but not usually both legs at once, and not usually in someone on blood thinners. But, given my history….(You know what’s coming next, right? YES! The emergency room!) He warned me: I might hear that they didn’t know what was going on either, but I had to go. So, because sometimes I do learn from my mistakes, off we went. I brought an apple. Mark brought an apple. Like, we thought we were going for a stroll around the block? HA. When we walked out six+ hours later, it was after midnight.

The Covid hospital crush is real. We were told to expect at least a three-hour wait to be seen for an initial assessment. When I heard my name at 2.5 hours, I jumped up. This was great! I received an invitation to be treated– in the hallway. “I’d love to!” I said with a big, fake smile. Mark couldn’t come because, well, it was a hallway and you can’t sit in a hallway. Long story short, I spent a lot of time hanging out in that hallway.  I spied on situations of other hallway patients. Eventually a doctor came, poked at my legs, and promised an ultrasound and other tests.  She disappeared. I hung out in the hallway a bunch more, got up to pee in a cup, went back to my bed and resumed hanging out.

Eventually, I was wheeled to a room in a distant part of the ER. It was quiet there; I felt a little lonely for my busy hallway niche. Eventually a vascular sonogram specialist appeared. She was surprisingly chipper for someone who’d been called out of bed. She plopped some goop on my legs and pushed the flat end of her wand up and down my legs. The doctor would read the results and treat accordingly, she said; vascular surgeons would review the scans and call if anything turned up. She bade me farewell and pushed her cart out the door, presumably on the way back to her cozy bed. I settled back to wait for the doctor.

Eventually the doctor whisked in. All the tests looked fine; she said. The nurse would bring my paperwork and I could go home. She whisked away.

Ten minutes passed. I heard a different doctor in the hallway, outside her patient’s room. She was calling yet another doctor– her patient had been on the sidewalk with his cat and a raccoon attacked him. She said to her colleague on the phone that she was hoping to draw on his experience; she sounded embarrassed. Raccoon bites on the face? I’ll take my puffy legs any day, I thought.

Fifteen minutes more. I went to the door and looked around. The other rooms were dark and occupied. I felt kind of goofy– these must have been very sick people and here I was, complaining about sausage legs. But I also wanted to go home. “Excuse me,” I said to the lone nurse behind the central desk. “I was told I could go home after receiving my paperwork. I’m thinking they may have forgotten me?” No, no, no, she assured me. Someone would be right along.

Fifteen more minutes. Now it was after 11. I peeked out the door again. The nurse at the desk was engrossed in her tasks. Casually, I left my room and strolled back through the maze of hallways toward where I thought I’d been. No one stopped me, nor was there a sign of my nurse. I aimed for the big central desk and gave my name. (I was amused– my nurse must have gone home and neglected to turn me over to her replacement.) The desk person picked up some spreadsheets and asked my name, what room had I been in. “Oh!” she said. She called over a nurse I hadn’t seen before. This nurse, who was taking care of a whole new crop of hallway patients, said she’d taken over for my nurse. (HA! They did forget me.) I waited for her to finish what she was doing, then I explained my situation. She promised to pull my paperwork together and get me out as soon as possible.

Five minutes more, then my papers and I walked out into the still full waiting area to my husband.

It was pouring. We were hungry. We were glad to be going home.

To be continued–