Lung Surgery!

[suze]

Eek ...

This is what it says on the Macmillan site:
Surgery| to remove the secondary lung cancer may be possible for a small number of people. It may be an option only if the primary cancer has been controlled and there is no evidence of the cancer having spread anywhere else in the body. It also requires the cancer to be affecting just one small part of the lungs, which is easy to get to, and not attached to important blood vessels or nerves.


In more detail similar stuff can be found here:

emedicine.medscape.com/article/426820-treatment#a1128

The reason Dr Adab is so keen on this is cos the bar is really high to even meet the criteria to be offered the surgery and in the writing I have found about it they are talking about curative rather the palliative, which is what I've been on before, so this is a marked improvement in expectations.

All good, eh.

[suze]

Some ppl wonder if surgery is the best option, or if there are alternatives .. but I am not keen on more radiation, I've already had a big dollop of that, albeit in a different part of the body ..

On the medscape reference site they say:
Other therapies and experimental treatments

Several other therapies are currently being used as alternatives to surgical resection, including radiofrequency ablation, cryoablation, and conventional radiotherapy.

However, most have limited availability and most involve enrollment in a structured clinical trial. Most are performed at experienced centers for patients who have lung malignancies (primary lung cancer or pulmonary metastases) and who are not candidates for surgery with the intent to resect. These therapies may also be used in conjunction with other treatments (ie, chemotherapy, radiotherapy) for better disease control.

So the focus is on trialling these alternatives if you cannot qualify for surgery (currently the gold-standard?) and then the talk is control rather than cure .. it seems ...

[suze]

Saw "my" surgeon today .. unlike my oncologist he rather forced me to look at the CT scan .. he can see a couple of other tiny spots which might be tumours near the main one ...

He thinks it is worth going ahead with the surgery, mainly because of the time elapsed already is "good" from the point of view of not expecting lots of new growths ... and the one he will be removing is near to the other tiny spots he can see, so he says he might be able to peg them for future radiation

He reckons the location of the tumour is favourable, though it is higher up and nearer to my heart than I had envisaged! :-\ he will start with key-hole techniques and switch to more invasive surgery if he needs to for the right level of access to the growth

on the question of open or laproscopic (key-hole) techniques he said that the old view was the touching the actual tumour was good way of knowing its extent, but he sort of feels improvements in CT scanning have made that a bit passé now ... and we can "risk" trying for laproscopic approach ...

I really liked him.

He will treat me after Christmas, exact date tba ... I am on HRT so he has to wait 6 weeks for that to clear in interests of reducing clot risk!