Lung Specialist

After I got back from the trip, I had an appointment to see a lung specialist (Dr. Rawson). After talking with him for a while, he seemed to be concerned about my rapid weight loss, shortness of breath and a couple of other symptoms that I noticed he reacted to a little differently when I talked about them. We scheduled a CT scan for the following Monday and planned on a Bronchoscope (sp?) for Tues. I went home feeling better because at least we had a direction now that seemed to offer hope of resolution. Until then it seemed like we were just “shooting on the dark” and “if this doesn’t work we will try something else”. Dr. Rawson did say that at that point “nothing was off the table”. He said it could be anything from aggravated pneumonia to Hodgkinsin’s disease to cancer and he did say the word cancer. He also said that I had a lot of fluid in the sack around my lungs and he wanted to drain the fluid and run tests on it and that would help my “shortness of breath”, because my lung was partially collapsed because of the excess fluid and we planned on draining it the following week. I called my sister Holly (in Ohio) and talked to her about some of this because I had a bad feeling and needed to talk to someone I could trust. She helped me a lot and then did her Mission President’s wife thing and started to research it for me. All her research did not lead to positive “anything” either. In fact she confirmed with her research what seemed to be what everyone else was alluding to and that was not happy.