Surgery vs No Surgery

[Susan Titus]

Need an opinion from some of you in the group. I was diagnosed in September with stage IV LMS. I had surgery to remove the tumor in my abdomen and started chemo on 11/1 for the two tumors in my lungs. I have had seven rounds of chemo and am starting to develop a toxicity to the chemo. The tumors have reduced significantly and could at this point just be scar tissue. My oncologist is going to talk to the group running my clinical trial but I may have to be done with chemo if that is true about the toxicity. That leaves me with a decision whether to remove the tumors/scar tissue in my lungs. I am meeting with a thoracic surgeon next week but would like your opinion. One option is to leave them in and they would serve as 'markers' to watch for future cancer activity. The other option is to remove them. The surgery sounds like it would be pretty painful. The tumors are in the same lung but different nodes and surgery would be very painful. 

Thank you for your thoughts and any questions we might want to ask the Thoracic surgeon.

Susan Titus

[LaVon Esswein]

I would ask if there was any way to do a needle biopsy to make sure if it's cancer or not. If it's not then surgery wouldn't be needed.  I will keep my fingers crossed it's not.    As far as the toxicity goes,,,,,good luck. I had to stop after 2 rounds I was so toxic.  My prayers Ares with you.  :-)

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[Betse]

I had the surgery on both of my lungs and I recovered remarkably well.  I was just really glad to get them tumors out.  I had one small lesion that remained in my right lung, but that was resolved by chemo.  Surgery was a good option for me.

Betse
diagnosed April 2009
stage iv uterine lms with mets to both lungs
NED since Dec. 2009

[Paula Zmuda]

Hi, Susan,     I don't know what to tell you. I think each of us is a little bit different with this disease and what works for one of us may or may not work for another. I had lung surgery this past December for a nodule in rt lung. They did what they call a "wedge resection". It was at the bottom of the lobe so didn't damage any portion of the upper lung. Now I have another nodule around 7 mm, and they want to do Cyberknife this time. Its in the upper right lung.    My surgery in December was short, done laproscopically;  I was only in the hospital for three days. The first day after surgery there was some pain, but meds took care of it. But this lung surgery was a lot easier than the abdominal surgeries I had in 2011.    Its hard to know what to do and when to do it. I would ask your thoracic surgeon if he/she is an oncological surgeon, and if not, has he had very many cancer surgeries, and what is his success rate as far as recurrence goes? Would your surgery be laproscopic?   Its important to get clean margins. Would he do that?  Also, how do they know that the stuff left in your lung is just scar tissue? Can you get scar tissue from chemo? If you leave it in, stop chemo, and just let it sit there, what are the chances that it will not grow again and/or what are the chances that cells migrate to another portion of your body and grow another tumor there?  If its so tiny, then surgery to remove it would be a smaller surgery, wouldn't it? Of course, I don't know where it is located in your lung, I'm no doctor, and I don't know about your case.        If it was me, I think I would want it out of there, every bit of it. Every time another nodule occurs, that's my gut reaction, I just want it out of my body, as soon as possible. But that's just me. I know surgery and recovery can be painful, but medication usually takes care of any pain I am feeling. I can put up with some pain knowing there's a good chance the surgeon got the tumor out with clean margins. Now I hope I haven't added to your stress about this lung surgery stuff; you can make informed decisions about your surgery from the knowledge you've obtained from your oncologist, and your surgeon. You're weighing the pros and cons and that's seems a sensible way of reasoning out your decisions.  I wish you the best. Paula ULMS 2009       --- On Fri, 3/29/13, Susan Titus <ansk...@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Susan Titus <ansk...@gmail.com> Subject: [NLMSF] Surgery vs No Surgery