MAY 17, 2022 – Blogger’s note: Compulsion for medical yakety-yak has pre-empted the next installment of my account of The Grand Odyssey. The “trip” will resume tomorrow.
Before I was diagnosed with cancer (multiple myeloma), I eschewed conversations about medical ailments. Such talk made me queasy. Now look at me: five months into drugs I can’t pronounce, medical personnel more numerous than fans at a Stones concert, and so many needle jabs to make searching for a straw in a stack of needles impossible, I yakety-yak about medical matters until the un-anesthetized are asleep.
Okay, then . . . Yesterday, I had the long-awaited consultation with the doctor in charge of my anticipated stem cell transplant at the U of MN hospital—a procedure designed to knock down the cancer for a longer-term stretch or at least until a knock-out cure is found.
The doc wasted no time with small talk but went straight to the heart of the matter. Oops! Anatomically, that’s off the mark. He went straight to my lungs. During “boot camp” two weeks ago, I’d undergone a battery of tests to determine if (a) my treatment thus far had reached the optimal level, and (b) my body was otherwise in good enough shape to withstand potential risks of the transplant procedure. My doc is data driven, and the data fell short: (1) my counts (proteins lurking as the result of the cancer) hadn’t quite reached optimal levels for the transplant business, and (2) I flunked the pulmonary function test (!), though I passed after use of a nebulizer.
I’ll need to undergo two more three-week cycles of pre-transplant treatment of the cancer and at least a month of twice-daily doses of fluticasone propionate and salmeterol (conveniently, otherwise called, “Advair”) to improve my lung function.
This latter fowl in the fan surprised me. Except for my cat allergy, which ended with the demise of our second cat at the start of Covid, my lungs have served me admirably. All my life I’ve run and skied and climbed the stairs instead of taking the elevator. Moreover, as I told the pulmonologist, I’ve never worked in a coal mine, chemical factory, or hog-raising facility; and never smoked . . . not even tobacco. The culprits, it seems, were the cats. A couple of years into the “Feline Regime,” I’d developed asthma and gone to the doc, who prescribed Advair—to reduce inflammation on a long-term basis—and Albuterol for acute, episodic breathing problems around the cats. I never took the Advair; only the Albuterol.
Fast forward to the future that was then, which is now, and I have a set of compromised lungs. The pulmonologist explained that because I’m otherwise in good shape, this condition was camouflaged—until “boot camp” exposed it.
The risk: if I were to contract any viral infection, including, but not limited to, break-through Covid, I’d be, well, or rather, not “well,” but hosed. The good news is that my restricted airways can likely be remedied.
What surprises me is . . . me: I reacted not with disappointment but with relief that my lung condition was discovered, ironically, because of the cancer.
Not to worry. Life is good. A good life is even better. A life with unrestricted airways and cancer-in-remission is best.
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
