My first thought to this is: Is it really possible to have so much bad luck to catch two life-threatening illnesses in the lungs at once? Or is one of them a false positive? It seems a statistical oddity.

So I really would try to have this all double-checked, which likely you will have done anyway. Even then - it's amazing what medicince can learn in just a few years, so every year longer you have gives better chance of success.

Best wishes to you, and strength.

I really hope that the pulmonary fibrosis is a wrong diagnostic so you can focus on the cancer with the benefit of a totally adequate therapy and a real hope...now, if the pronostic reveals to be unfavorable, the quality of life is the choice: of course for you, but for those who love you too: the good moments to share together , given the circumstances, is a very precious victory on the disease for everyone . I speak from experience.You are in my thoughts.

What a wonderful, supportive community this is; weighing in with both personal and constructive advice.
I hope you find it all comforting and helpful Destructis; I wish you well.

Wow, don't really know how to respond. All I have to say is that I'm very impressed at the way you are handling it.

I wish all the best for you and your family.

Jaz

Good luck w the fight Destructis! A lot of good people pulling for you...

I too have recently started the battle and find that I will likely be using the restroom in a plastic bag for the remainder of my life..Woot ! Lol... ( I try to find humor in what i can)
Although my prognosis is better than yours having percentages thrown at you for survival is still unsettling. I have gone through the whole process of my own mortality as well, and find at least for me the only thing that upsets me is thinking about my son not understanding my absence.why I left him....



Give Em hell dude!

Oh for the record for anyone curious, I have been diagnosed with stage III colorectal cancer.
Also- Please note that for some people myself included the chemo and radiation at least the first part was not hard on me whatsoever. Besides a little fatigue I haven't experienced any of the negative side effects many people suffer from.
Folfox Chemotherapy , Radiation was done with a trilogy machine at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa .. I called it the Death Star. Funny until I saw that In text form I never thought of that as being morbid. LOL

It's very hard for me to wrap my head around death. It's also very hard for me to offer condolences or kind words that don't just sound hollow to me in the scope of what you're going through. I am an intensely empathic person, I guess to the point that words can't express what I feel, so I usually say nothing. It's weird. I hope that you beat this, even if it sounds and looks very bad, and wish you the best in this fight, however long it takes. My inadequate words, but heartfelt.

I am so sorry to hear that.. I am at a loss for words but I will include you in my prayers..

This world in which we live is so unique. Fifty years ago no one would have thought that people would develop relationships and communities across the globe, where they rarely if ever meet face to face but relationships none the less, that are such that an intimate detail of one's life such as this could be shared with a community and received with such a degree of compassion, sympathy and in some cases empathy..

I've long thought about what to write. My vocabulary lacks.

I feel really sorry. My thoughts are with you and your family.

Best wishes

Karsten

Tom Cofield has the right of it. I will make an informed decision. I still beleive that quality of life is very very important. By the way Tom, I had a heart attack at 38 and have 4 stents in my heart. I know I am out of the running for a lung transplant.

I think some of you are mistaking accepting reality as giving up.

I also think that some of you don't know what to say or how to handle it, so you tell me to fight it and never give up hope. I *think* you are projecting what you would tell a loved one or how you would feel if it were yourself.

When making this type of decision, you have to remove emotion. There so many more realistic things that you have to think about. For example, the expense. I could blow everything just trying to live a little longer and ruin my family financially. I know some of you are going to be shocked I said that, but it's the truth. Remove emotion and think about it.

Some of you are seeing things for what they are and some aren't. We deal with death in different ways. If you think I am not going to give death a quick kick in the balls, you are mistaken.

I am angry about something now though. I called my pulmonologists office to schedule a follow up. The lady who makes the appointments said she had to pull up my records. She did and then scheduled me for December 19th. Now they don't know I got a copy of the report of the PET Scan. I was just shocked and didn't know what to say and hung up the phone. A little bit later, sent this email. Please note, they have no idea that I know about the cancer at this point.

=======================================

Good morning,

I had a Pet Scan on 10/25/12. I asked for a copy of the results from Dedicated Imaging. According to the Pet Scan, I have cancer. I called this morning to make an appointment with Dr. XXXXX and the earliest available appointment is 12/19/12. I am disappointed that your office is going to wait for a month and a half to tell me I have cancer along with my pulmonary fibrosis. I had an appointment with my primary care physican on Friday and I asked her to explaing the Pet Scan results to me. She told me it says I have cancer in my upper right lymph nodes and in my groin.

So your office seriously is going to wait a month and a half to tell me about the cancer?

I hope you can move the appointment up to a sooner date so we can put in a plan of action on how to deal with the cancer.

Thank you,

=============================================

I haven't seen a response yet. I also have that follow up with my primary care doctor tomorrow to go over the lab results and I am going to talk to her about what is happening with this.

Wow man! I certainly hope you're going to a center that you have confidence in. When I first was diagnosed a few months back I was pointed in several directions and several specialists all of which communicated in a lackluster manner leaving me..(The least informed person in the group.) To sometimes relay information test results faxes etc.

I have no doubt each individual specials in his or her own right very qualified however it was worrisome to be left with the responsibility sometimes to make sure things got done. Eventually I decided to jump ship and went to a specialist center fortunately for me not too far away.

Destructis,

My thoughts and prayers are with you.

Destructis:

The human condition is sometimes the most amazing thing. I am glad to hear you have made peace with dying and I truly hope this thread is cathartic for you. This was not meant to be mean, but is necessary for quality of life and will help to make better decisions. One will have a hard time making informed decisions if the mind is not at peace. You and yours are in our prayers and thoughts. My wife and I have both had experiences where we have had to make peace with dying.

I can speak from me and my wife's experience, most definitely get a second and third opinion. You must be your own advocate. For five years we had been telling eleven different doctors that there was something wrong with my wife. Severe, massive headaches, left eye beginning to lose sight and then a sudden weight gain of over 170 lbs in the last year. It turned out she was diagnosed with an eighteen cm pituitary tumor and it was causing a considerable amount pressure against her left eye. She was diagnosed with Cushings Disease, different from Cushings Syndrome. Nobody had thought to test for it because it is so rare and Cushing Syndrome is not. The doctors told us she had less than six months to live (our daughter had just turned seven). The tumor was producing elevated levels of ACTH causing her adrenal glands to over produce cortisol, which is a steroid hormone, in dangerous amounts. It was thinning her bones and damaging her organs. (These are things we know now, not 26 years ago.) About two and a half months later we got a phone call from UCSF (Univ California San Francisco) Medical Center asking her to met with two neurologists. They basically asked her to be a guinea pig for a new type of transsphenoidal surgery to remove the tumor. They asked because she had the largest pituitary tumor to date and was in a study that we had agreed to. They explained that the new procedure not been performed on a live human yet and that her chances of surviving the surgery were less than thirty percent, and if she did survive they could not predict what the prognosis would be and could not tell us what neurological complications would result. They were very blunt and we appreciated that, they had explained that the surgery no matter what happened would help them understand more about pituitary tumors as not a lot was really known about them and this was in the mid 1980's. My wife being a nurse started asking a lot of questions and wrote down all of their answers and then she researched about the doctors. It turned out they were the leading neurologists at that time and were writing research articles on pituitary tumors for JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), so she is in the journal for August of 1986. They had found out about her by reviewing the university's medical files (it is a teaching hospital)and tracking the study group she was in. The next largest tumor was less than ten cm. She survived the surgery and it seemed at the time the only lingering effect was no peripheral vision in her left eye. She also dropped most of her weight, from over 300 lbs to under 160 lbs. They also removed 35 percent of her pituitary gland. After a year she went back to work and she broke her back, lifting a patient. She collapsed her L1 thru L5 one on top of the other. The doctors told her she would never walk or wear heels again, she proved them wrong. (She loves her heels.)

Move forward twenty six years, she has survived multiple organ failure twice, she has to take synthetic cortisol because her adrenal glands do not work and she is in constant severe pain. She has had osteoarthritis and osteoporosis since her twenties. Her doctors took her out of work five years ago. Everything she does is a finely balanced act as far as her health is concerned. Getting back to the human condition, every time she was told this is the final count she got back up. I admire my wife, she is one the strongest people I know. She inspires me to strive to be a better husband, father and man.

I guess what I'm trying to say in a very long winded kind of way is, sometimes things do not always turn out the way we are told or are assured they are going to happen. Like we did in the military, prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

Thank you for sharing with us and we hope that you are here for quite a while longer.

Take care,
C2

Man, I am sorry to hear that. Stay strong, I will make sure to keep you in my prayers. I do say them regularly, so I will mention you.

I have many thoughts on this. My first being that in an odd sort of way, it must be almost comforting to know what you are going to die from, and a rough idea of when. I'm close to 34, and I have no idea if I'll die today or live to be 100. I have no clues as to what will do me in. All I can do is wonder.

Secondly, one of my biggest fears of dying is through suffocation as well. It just seems like an extremely awful way to go. I used to feel the same about drowning, but reading a few things written by former SEALS, it almost sounds pleasant in the end. They say it becomes oddly peaceful when you're about to lose consciousness and drown. Anyway, I know it is an unpopular idea, but I think if it were me, I would be heavily looking into ways to leave life by my own hand, at my own time. If things ever became unbearable, or the threat of suffocating to death was looking imminent, I'd want to have all of my options on the table. I'm not saying this is what YOU SHOULD DO, I'm just saying it's what I MIGHT DO in a similar situation.

I'm sad to hear about your situation. I wish you and your family the best.

It's been really great and uplifting to hear all of the positive stories about friends and relatives beating cancer. If it were not for this thread, I doubt they ever would have been shared here. Thank you all for doing that.



I have considered this and it's still a possibility down the road. I think the chance of my doing this is very very small. In all of the reading I have done, at the end with the IPF, Doctors give you morphine which removes the panic of feeling like you can't breathe. The people don't suffer to much at the end. I don't know what kind of cancer it is yet, so I can't do any research on it.

If I have time later today, I want to write about how I am dealing with it and my job.

I have to take my mother to a follow up from her surgery yesterday. She had laser surgery for her Glaucoma and I took her. No I haven't told her yet and don't plan to until I get worse. She is 71 and constantly worries about my brother and sister. I don't want her to add to that with me.

Just another cancer survivor here. It's 7 years now since I last danced with the devil, when I was 45. My kids were still children back then, and knowing I was going to leave them was agony. The letter that I wrote to them, to be delivered after my "departure", still sits unopened on my desk.

It all changed on my very first radiotherapy session. I was waiting for my turn and feeling sorry for myself when a little kid, 7 or 8 years old, came in on a litter, surrounded by cooing nurses. The poor little guy was as bald as an egg.
All of a sudden I felt the luckiest guy in the world. This horrible thing was happening only to me, and not to one of my children!

After that, no matter the physical agony of chemo, radio and surgery, it was relatively easy going. I chose public health care and didn't spend a single euro of my family's resources hoping to improve my chances of survival: it was bad enough I was going to have to abandon them without adding a financial burden to the bargain. Nevertheless they gave me first class treatment, for which I will always be thankful.

So Destructis I have an idea of what you are going through, and I admire your courage and your sense of humor. Keep it up. Facing the worst with courage and a light heart is the best legacy a Dad can leave to his children.

You may have found that in these circumstances the greatest stress is the anxiety and the uncertainty. Here is a little story that proved very useful to me, they say it circulated among soldiers in WWI trenches:

"Tomorrow we assault the enemy, there are only two possible outcomes: either I am unharmed o I am wounded.
If I am unharmed, there's nothing to worry about.
But if I am wounded, there are only two possible outcomes: either I am lightly wounded o I am gravely wounded.
If I am lightly wounded, there's nothing to worry about.
But if I am gravely wounded, there are only two possible outcomes: either I recover and survive, or I die.
If I recover and survive, there's nothing to worry about.
And if I die, why the heck should I worry?"

My appointment for the annual MRI is next month. Hope it'll be great news again, but who knows...
No matter, Life is a wonderful thing. Every single day, however #%&*$#, is a priceless gift. Get well, my friend, and keep smiling.

Nibio, that is a good story and I hope it is true to the way I try to live, looking at the seemingly insurmountable problems and situations in smaller increments, which don't seem so overwhelming. Like the rest of us here, I will pray for Destructis and the best possible outcome while recognizing that only he can take this bull by the horns.
rick

Not to diminish what Destructis is going through, but all of us will will grow old, or at least, all of us will die. If you knew exactly when this was going to happen, how many would spend so much time posting and reading messages here, spending the only time they'll ever have? Prayers don't stop that, people might feel as though they offer some comfort or some sense that something is in control, but with poison certainty, life is not permanent, and no prayer will ever change that. What are any of you going to do today to make use of the time you have?

Could you at least have the decency to keep your rubbish out of this thread?

Don't be so quick to get bent out of shape. Don't be so quick to see the worst in everything.

I don't know really what it is that disturbs you, the certain fact that we're all faced with the same knowledge of our own mortality, or the question with what to do with our time?

Destructis of course is faced right now with a hard time, which we all have coming. The question is, do we really make the most of our time- think about it.