Black Lung

Bored of having a port in my chest and not being stabbed yet I decided to go to the hospital last Tuesday to finally get plugged in.

Well not that I chose to, prior to that I had a cough that was around for a week or so prior that I just couldn’t kick. No pain, fever, sore throat or congestion- just an annoying dry cough. My oncologist wanted me to get scanned to make sure my lungs weren’t inflamed or that the cancer hadn’t spread. Good news- the scan was clear, well the cancer was still in my body but not in my lungs. Bad news- no clue what is causing this cough, maybe the black lung?

So armed with a prescription for codeine I was headed home with no concrete answer but, if I want to look at the positive:

So let me tell you about the whole experience because it was different. Upon arrival I went to urgent care. No, not the urgent care for you common folk but the cancer urgent care. We cancer patients are needy and spoiled, we require our own urgent care because we are better* than you.

*Better meaning to the insurance companies, we bring in more money for them.

So I took my fancy self to my urgent care where I opened the door and I immediately heard “JOE?!?” -I swear. Now you’re probably thinking someone working there was named Joe and technically you are right BUT it was Joe calling out to me. See when you have cancer your brain doesn’t always work so great so they assign you only staff with the same name as you. So after Joe escorted me to my luxurious private suite stocked with apple juice, pretzels, more apple juice and a TV I could literally put an inch from my face, she got my line started and drew blood.

In case you’re not familiar, which I hope you’re not, the port is left open or accessed while you’re there so it can be used multiple times without having to restart it. So after my blood draw I was walked to the Radiology waiting room to wait for my CT. Now here I had to sit with the non-cancer patients, no special cancer room for me. The cool thing about this is I had my chest out with one nipple peaking out due to the port being open. I looked like I was taking part in some movement supporting mothers being able to breastfeed their babies in public. Or, I looked like I was in the middle of a mental breakdown. Either way, the real good news is that no one wants to sit next to a man with his chest exposed, wires coming out and a free peep show which is great considering I think the hospital discourages masks judging by the scarcity of them.

So me and my décolletage sauntered across the hall to my CT then back down the hall to my VIP waiting area and behind my privacy sheet. Another nurse, nameless since she wasn’t name Joe, came in and told me my blood was bad. Well she said my creatinine was a little high. So she asked me if I wanted a half or full bag in my IV. “Full” I told the bartender while I waited for my results. And as said before the results were clear.

I also had my first treatment with the port on Thursday last week. Nothing out of the ordinary happened and I didn’t have to parade with my chest out through the cancer center.

I had a few people reach out to check in and see how I’m doing. They all asked what the next steps are so I figured I’d recap it high level here. I’m going to continue treatment plan B for now. My next scans should be sometime in February which will give us an idea of what is going on however it could show little to no growth which is good but we would want to see that sustained over time to gauge the effectiveness of plan B. That’s kind of it for now.

Anyways have a happy holidays, unless you don’t like that term then have an unhappy holidays.

-Joe