Today started out great. A wonderful night of sleep, got up, brewed some coffee. I even felt pretty great about how well I was doing being six months into a serious diagnosis. I checked my email, saw I had a test result on my chart from my CT scan doing my follow up appointment regarding my aortic aneurysm.
In that report I read--with no warning what so ever--that I had two lung nodules, high in my right lung, one at 3mm and one at 4mm, that I should have a CT scan in a year (was going to anyway for the aneurysm) and that I should have a referral to a pulmonologist. According to my CT scan in August, I had no nodules, effectively meaning these were new growths, and presumably fast growing (at least to my medical doctorate I got from google).
I lost my mind. Just seconds before I was doing so well. The floor fell out from under me. I immediately (after googling a bunch of crap about lung nodules) made a call to my PCP for the referral appointment. I drove in silence, like I was already a dead man, basically doing the stages of grief during my 30 minute drive to the doctor's office, coming through at acceptance about the time I arrived.
The appointment went well. I have an excellent PCP. He has the personality of a door stop, but he is wonderfully thurough and detailed, and patient. All the things I needed this morning.
He told me that this is nothing to worry about, that they were the same size during my august CT scan. The thing is, I didn't have that information in my report--or at least I didn't read it because I saw the words "lung nodules" and pretty much knew I was just a dead man, I didn't read the rest of the report. Had I done so, I would have perhaps learned that they must have been missed by the radiologist last August, because my cardio-thoracic surgeon found them just fine on the old scans and the new.
My current doctor said that if I had never smoked, they wouldn't even do a follow up. But I did smoke for five years, quitting 20 years ago, so they will treat me as at potential risk for malignancy, even though my idiotic smoking career was short lived. I have them looked at again in October when I get my aortic aneurysm re-scanned, and meet a pulmonologist on February 7. My PCP told me not to lose sleep over it.
As it turns out, I went through the entire HA cycle that is normally weeks for me, in the space of about three hours. I am actually sort of laughing about it now.
There is, actually, a small chance that one or both could be cancerous, but I was told neither of them had grown in the last six months, unless they grow in the next year, I will try and put them out of my head.
Just sharing my HA speed journey of this morning, perhaps with a bit of humor. I also wonder how many of us have HA cycles that start because of bad information, misinformation, or misinterpretation. Hell, in my case, I just misread something and went from a "watch and see" condition, to envisioning my death and thinking I best get that will written I had put off.
Anyone else out there rocking some lung nodules too? Hope yours are benign, as I do mine.
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