Lung cancer
Submitted by mutant_pie on January 7, 2007 - 5:21pm.
Remember Outdoors
Hi,
I was writing a note to a friend about a missed connection and I found myself explaining that I had been busy with my friend Dana. He's been busy too, dealing with lung cancer treatments, mostly chemo, after forty years of smoking, and I've been going with him to the chemo infusion center. My uncle Gene is sort of going through the same thing, but he isn't healthy enough to get the treatments if I understand correctly. Anyway here's an excerpt from the note that I wanted to share with folks;
I've been busy, actually, so I don't know if we would have been here when you would have cruised by. Dana went back into the hospital. He had a blot clot in his leg, which oddly enough made his breathing even harder, but I guess that they can do that. The doc's said that clots forming is not an unusual side effect of having the lung cancer. The treatment is a twice daily injection of an anticlotting medicine called Hepron, for six months. He's home from the hospital now, and generally resting. We have two more chemo therapy related visits early this week, then he's off for awhile.
Hey guy's, I know that getting preachy with someone won't work, but I'm still going to make my "sales pitch" here and now, because I'm writing about this and maybe you're thinking about it a little after having read the above paragraph. Please quit smoking while you still can. It's not worth the pain, debilitation, and heart ache. Not being able to breath at half of your normal capacity (alone as a symptom) wrecks everything else in your life. If you have to go through the chemo, besides losing your hair (which seems like nothing compared to the rest of it), you lose your sense of taste, but your sense of smell amplifies horribly, which is when you find out that most smells are not pleasant. Going through the long list of nasty changes to your body usually doesn't scare anyone, I know, besides, they're too long to list here. Because no one can do it for you, please love yourself enough to quit.
C'ya later, MP