Breathlessness

Hi

I am sorry that no-one with any relevant experience of your situation has replied; this reply will push your thread back up the main page and may help to prompt further replies.

My only advice unfortunately is the obvious one; make sure you tell them about the increasing breathlessness when you go for your  next treatment or, if that is not soon, contact your Oncologist to raise your concerns/questions.

Kegsy x

My husband has just started immunno therapy no one has told us it will improve his breathing but will hopefully try to stop the cancer spreading anymore he has it in both lungs ,liver and spine . He has terrible trouble breathing too they have told us it is because he has copd  they have just arranged for him to have oxygen delivered to th he house. He also felt better when he was on steroids but they stopped them completely just before he started treatment. He now gets completely breathless all the time he rarely get s out of bed because of this we are hoping that the oxygen helps him.

I apparently have COPD too I was told. Also cancer in both lungs and my liver. I did chemotherapy before they offered me immunotherapy.(Atezolizumab) which I have just completed my third cycle of. They seem quite enthusiastic about it as I believe it has had quite a good success rate. Luckily, I do not seem to have had any side effects from it, although I have not yet noticed any changes. They did say though that it normally takes several sessions for things to start happening. In fact, I feel perfectly normal apart from the awful breathlessness, from which I have gone steadily downhill from walking a mile and a half a day in June of last year to no more than about thirty feet without getting breathless now. At first the breathlessness was being caused by fluid in the pleura of my right lung. Draining it off every few weeks was a great relief. Then it just dried up but the breathlessness continued, now caused by something else.

They asked me to cut down my steroids to 10mg or less a day because steroids conflict with the immunotherapy and cutting them down gives the therapy a better chance to work. I wish your husband all the very best and success with the therapy. I know how utterly unbearable the breathlessness can be, sometimes hard to get the point over to others who have never personally experienced it.

Thanks for that reply i only hope that you feel much better soon we can only hope that the treatment helps in some way my husband is on pembrolizumab he wasn't given any other treatment before this and would not give him steroids with this treatment  his oxygen levels were very low today but he would not go in hospital so eventually today they agreed to give him oxygen at home but it will not be de!ivered until tomorrow i only hope he is alright tonight.

I`m glad your husband is getting oxygen provided at home. It seems to be a fine line between them supplying oxygen or not. I hope he was alright last night. All I have really apart from inhalers and Oromorph are my little personal electric fans called Mini Cooli which I bought for about seven pounds each on Ebay. I bought two so I could always have on charging. No doubt your husband already has one, if not I can definitely recommend them. You just let them blow the cold air around the sides of your mouth . For instant relief, they work better than anything else. Although I`m up and about all day, I am pretty housebound because of the fear of picking up another lung infection, which I fear would likely be fatal because I do not have sufficient puff to cough up the resulting phlegm. Also, even short walks of only about twenty paces make me so breathless.All the best for your husband and good luck for the future.