A Pleural What? (A Cancer Update)

There's an update on the cancer front. It's not much of one, but I thought I'd fill everyone in on the latest and greatest. 

Last Friday, I noticed that I had developed a sharp pain on the right side of my abdomen (right under the bottom of my rib cage). Mostly I didn't notice the pain too much except when I took a breath... so yeah, a lot! If I took a deep breath, it was like someone stabbed me with an ice pick. Not fun. All weekend long, I had that pain in my side continually. The pain level was annoying but not overly distracting. I thought perhaps I might have pulled a muscle, but that didn't seem quite right. Last night, as I was heading off to sleep, I rolled on my back and it was like someone took an axe to my abdomen. It was seriously effing painful! I almost went to the ER, just because it was so painful. Before going the expensive ER route, I took 4 ibuprofen to see if it would dull the pain and after an hour it was back to the ice pick pain.

It occurred to me that it might be pleurisy (the inflammation of the lining of the lungs) or a pleural effusion (the build up of fluid around the lungs). Not life threatening, but pretty flipping painful. Why did I think it might be one of these diagnoses and not a pulled muscle? You see both pleurisy and pleural effusions can be symptoms of the metastatic lung cancer. About half of all cancer patients develop pleural effusion. Joy! It occurred to me that the little bastards in my lungs might be waking up. The symptoms of pleural effusion are: shortness of breath, dry cough, pain, feeling of chest heaviness, inability to exercise, and malaise. Would you like to hazard a guess as to how many of these symptoms I'm experiencing? If you guessed all of them, you win the prize!

In order to know for sure, I called my oncologist's office this morning to see if I could get a quickie appointment. Fortunately, the office was able to squeeze in an appointment with the nurse practitioner (as my doctor was not in the office today). She did a basic examination and heard the muffling in my lungs and concurred it might be a pleural effusion. In order to know for sure, it's time for another CT. It was almost time for my next CT anyway, so it's being moved up a week or two. No big deal. 

On Friday morning, I head off to the hospital for blood work and a CT. In the meantime, I've got painkillers to help with the pain. I'll have the results next Tuesday, September 2. 

Stay tuned!