Hi everyone, I'm hoping you can help me. My mum is 57, she was had a chest xray in February and they found a shadow on her lung, this was confirmed as probable lung cancer with a CT Scan. We were told that the mass was 5cm big and deep in her lung, she then had a biopsy, Pet CT scan etc to confirm their thoughts. My mum had a consultant appointment yesterday and was told definitely lung cancer and it was classed as T4, it has also spread to her kidney.
She has her first Oncology appointment on Tuesday which I'm attending with her but in the meantime I am going out of my mind with worry. She has been very vague and says not to dwell on it as they said at the consultant appointment that she would have an intensive course of chemotherapy and they were going to try gene therapy which is apparently a fairly new treatment.
I'm all for being positive but I've done the dreaded Google search and the outlook is pretty bleak.
Do people recover from lung cancer that has spread already?
Has anyone ever heard of gene therapy?
Is she going to die?
Sorry in advance for being eccentric but I am terrified.
Hi Legend1984
Sorry to hear about your mum, but great news that she had you to support in the appointment. Often people find it helpful to tape a little notepad to these meetings to note down key words that we might not really understand and then either ask for a bit more information from the oncologist or come here to ask others or even use our ask a expert service who may have the time to explain in more detail.
While google can be a great source of information many rate is bedside manner as dreadful. Often people will share things that might have gone wrong much more commonly than things that went right and so the bias is very much towards a bleaker picture than might be the case.
My wife's cancer is quite different in that it started in her womb but is now mostly in her lungs. When she was diagnosed she never wanted to know "how long" - and frankly nobody can tell us anyway. There are statistics on how many people with this time of cancer might survive for x years but guessing if one person falls one side of the line or the other is really hard. My wife's cancer is incurable but, for now, it appears to have stopped growing and it is not stopping her, or indeed us, getting on with life - living with cancer is our new world.
There is quite a good lot of information on gene therapy on the cancer research site here that might help you understand a bit more about that.
If we look at Your feelings when someone has cancer we can see how totally "normal" we are in the most extra ordinary of circumstances. Many of us who have been on this journey for some time look back and think of how they felt and how having a friend who listens is the most powerful support of all. Thank you for sharing your story and I hope you will find our many friends on here the help you need because even by sharing your story you will have helped others.
<<hugs>>
Steve
