Chapter 5

November, 2006

The next day he sent me a reassuring email: The doctor thinks I just have bronchitis. It’s not pneumonia. I breathed more easily, even if he didn’t. Bronchitis. Great. We could take care of that easily enough.

But the doctor had also taken an x-ray, just to be on the safe side, and later in the afternoon I got an email that there was fluid in his chest, and Don was going to the pulmonologist to have it drained.

I frowned, and paced the floor. As far as I knew, fluid in the chest meant pneumonia. Why had the doctor said it wasn’t pneumonia if he had pneumonia? And I’d never heard of anyone having fluid drained from pneumonia. What on earth was going on?

When Don got home, he clarified the issue.

“Not fluid in the lung, like pneumonia. Fluid on the lung. It’s called a pleural something or other. They drained two liters out of my chest.”

“Two liters!” I imagined him walking around with the equivalent of a Coke bottle in his chest, and instantly felt sympathetic. “Poor thing. No wonder you were having trouble breathing.”

“Yeah, no kidding. I asked him if we could wait to drain it till after Thanksgiving, and he said I might not be breathing by then. They didn’t get it all, quite. My ribs started hurting, and they had to stop. But they got most of it.” Flashing grin. “I feel better now.”

“What causes that?”

“I think he said it could be cancer. But it could also be a hematoma from that accident I was in. They’re going to do a CT scan, and they’re going to test the fluid.”

We were heading to his parents' house for Thanksgiving, but I found time to do a quick Internet search, and what I found wasn’t encouraging. Fluid on the lung was called a pleural effusion, and it meant fluid was building up between the lung and the membrane around it, which is called the pleura. My brief glance over a few medical sites was enough to tell me that if the effusion was caused by cancer, it was a bad, bad sign. But there were other causes, so I didn’t panic. We went to his parents' house and had fun with the family.

But the whole time, I worried.

*****
December, 2006

When they tested the fluid, it wasn't good news.

Not too many days after the message on my answering machine let me know Don had cancer again, I got an email from him, very terse and lacking his usual snark: I just got off the phone with the doctor. The tumor is non-small cell lung cancer of the type adenocarcinoma. There is some in the upper lung (3 centimeters) and in the middle of the lung (size not specified but I believe it was smaller than the other) with two nodules in the right lung (5 and 6 millimeters).

The abdominal and pelvic c.t. scan showed nothing abnormal and the chest c.t. showed no problems with the liver or lymph nodes. There is some concern about the upper thoracic vertebrae so a bone scan may be done.

He also said the fluid is building in my pleura again. It has increased from 1/3 of the cavity to 1/2 since it was drained. He seems to think completely draining the fluid and adhering the pleura to the lung would be a good idea, but the procedure requires 48 hours and a hospital stay.

I stared at the message for a long time. Don had never smoked, had always avoided secondhand smoke like the plague, had even avoided going to restaurants that had too much smoke drifting into the nonsmoking section. And now, ironically, he had lung cancer... and he was almost certainly going to die of it.

Only eight percent of men who die from lung cancer are nonsmokers. Once again, he’d beaten the odds.

But not at all in a good way.

Read Chapter 6 here.