Today, not knowing what type of diseases or what type of people I was going to meet. I had a stressful day because I had my own personal problems and I was dealing with my good friend who just recently been hospitalized. So I had mixed emotions coming into work, sad and frustrated.
As I walked in I got report from a patient that I recently took care of. A single lobe transplant patient secondary to emphysema and COPD. The way he got emphysema and COPD was because he smoked for 10 years. Smoking or any type of smoking can possibly burn off the connective tissue and membranes that create the elasticity of your lungs which allows them to expand. This disease prevents that from happening allowing very minimum oxygen to diffuse thru the membrane into your blood stream.
Lungs transplant is a very unique organ because oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange happens due to diffusion and osmosis. A heart transplant is removing a heart and replacing it with a new one. It’s like taking off a plumbing pipe from the bottom of your house and replacing it with a new one. The flow of fluid will continue as accordingly. Now Lung transplant, how long for them to get better depends on the lung and absorption of oxygen which can be based on many factors such as the conditioning of the new lung, etc.
Like I said the patient was recently admitted, and just last year he received his right lung transplant. And it was a success, he has been responding to medications appropriately. Labs values have been within normal limits and have had no serious symptoms since his last admission. He was admitted because he had a routine bronchoscope exam per routine to evaluate the lung. During an x-ray, we notice on the left lung there was something that caught our attention. We did further examination and during the bronchoscope we received a biopsy what we found to be a mass on his non transplanted lung.
After the specimen was sent to pathology it was later found out that the mass is malignant. He now has cancer on his non transplanted side and prognosis is that he has 2-4 months to live. It was so hard to be in the room with him and the medical team to explain to him what was concluded. We said that we would be aggressive as much as possible but lung cancer really has low survival rates especially because he has stage four, meaning it has spread to his body (liver, pancreas, heart). Patient falls on his knees, with tears rolling down his face, saying "my son, my son"; I approached him and lay my hand on his back. "I want to be a grandfather; I want to see my kids grow up", his arms shaking and legs trembling. I was speechless. We as a team stood there with him for a moment and tried to stay as positive as we could. And only thing we can promise is that we will be as aggressive as possible to fight this battle that he is not alone.
He just got transplanted, his life was suppose to turn around, and his transplant suppose to give him extra time so he can have with his family, but cancer is something that we are still fighting till this day and can show up abruptly, once it’s there, there is no stopping it, it will take your life and every bit of happiness you have. I stood shock, and speechless, imagining if it was me. Oh man!
No comments:
Post a Comment