Okay, here’s the deal. The CT showed that the pulmonary fibrosis is progressing — no surprise since it’s a progressive disease. As it progresses, I get less well. The CT also showed a mass or dark spot of some kind in one of my lungs. The doctors still seem to believe it’s pneumonia or maybe a fungal infection, but they concede the possibility it may be something else, or something additional. Cancer is a possibility, in other words.<\/p>\n
There are only two ways to know for sure what’s going on: (1) A biopsy. (2) Dramatic improvement as a result of the current course of treatment, which would render the likelihood of cancer just about nil.<\/p>\n
There are two ways to do this kind of biopsy: an intubation-type procedure to suck out some of the affected tissue, or a needle. The problem: I’m using so much oxygen now just to maintain something close to a normal saturation percentage that blocking my throat with a tube could land me on a ventilator (for an indeterminable length of time), and going in with a needle could collapse the lung.<\/p>\n
So, for now, the doctors are trying to reduce the levels of pure oxygen I require. As that happens, the biopsy procedures become less dangerous.<\/p>\n
The fun part: If it is<\/em> cancer, it’s Game Over. They don’t transplant cancer patients.<\/p>\n So, it’s all pretty fucking scary. I was having such a tough time breathing yesterday I was half-convinced I wasn’t going to make it through the night. Morning came, along with the respiratory therapist and the blood-taking-person, so I guess I was wrong.<\/p>\n I wish I didn’t have to think about all this at the moment, or, rather, that I had sufficient energy to think and write about this, economics, politics, and Doctor Fate all at once. The outside world — at least what I can see of it on CNN — has suddenly become very entertaining.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Okay, here’s the deal. The CT showed that the pulmonary fibrosis is progressing — no surprise since it’s a progressive disease. As it progresses, I get less well. The CT also showed a mass or dark spot of some kind in one of my lungs. The doctors still seem to believe it’s pneumonia or maybe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wellness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}