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I had a lump in my neck, in the collarbone here and I had to go down for some scripts
so I just mentioned it to the doctor casually. He sent me for an x-ray. I came back and he
said ‘I think I’d like a scan.’ So I had the scan and then I was straight off to
the specialist.
When I was diagnosed, which took a while, at the hospital. And then someone had a good
idea to x-ray my chest. Well, there was the cancer of course. Well, then they had to find
a way of getting in to it. That was difficult. They did a biopsy but it took about two or
three weeks before they discovered what it was.
Dr Lou Irving (respiratory physician): With lung cancer we’re often the first specialist
to see a patient at a time when a mass or a nodule has been detected on a chest x-ray,
or other symptoms have occurred that are suspicious of lung cancer.
And our initial role is to take a history and examine the patient and to order further
diagnostic tests. One of those tests is a bronchoscopy, which is a telescope that’s
passed through the nose or mouth. Respiratory physicians perform that test, and we also
co-ordinate other tests and we’re often the people who in fact establish the diagnosis
and break the bad news of lung cancer.
But as part of that initial assessment there’s also further tests that need to be done, because
in general there’s much that can be done to manage lung cancer.
Those further initial assessments include a respiratory function test to measure the
strength of the lungs. In some cases we do an exercise test to be getting a more complete
idea of the fitness of the patient. The reason for doing these tests is to understand how
much treatment can be tolerated by a patient, both in terms of surgery, radiotherapy and
in some cases chemotherapy.
I was working when I got this rash on my face and I thought it was a wool rash – I work
with wool – so I went to my GP. He took a blood test. Then I had an x-ray, then I
had a cat scan and that’s how he found out that I had lung cancer.
Dr Linda Mileshkin: So lung cancer is a cancer that grows from cells within a person’s
lung. And lung cancer is actually one of the most common types of cancers in both males
and females in Australia as well as around the world.
There are different types of lung cancer – they’re not all the same cancer. For example, there’s
a type of cancer called small cell lung cancer and this is not a small cancer, which you
might expect from the name, but what it means is that when it’s looked at under the microscope,
that the individual cells that make up the lump of cancer are very small.
There’s another broad category of lung cancer called non-small cell cancer and this is actually
the most common type of lung cancer. And within that there are various sub types of lung cancer
that people might hear described such as adenocarcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma or large cell carcinoma.
The third broad category is mesothelioma, which is a type of cancer that tends to grow
around the outside of the lung and patients who have previously been exposed to asbestos.
And it’s really important that we try to define as precisely as possible, what type
of cancer a person has because the different types of lung cancer will need different types
of treatment.
They took me to the hospital and they took tests and did biopsies and within a month
I was in an operation and they took a quarter of my lung off.