I Gave Up Smoking for This?

It seems like whenever I discover a message on my voice mail late in the evening, the news isn't good. It's never a dear old friend calling out of the blue or hearing (for real), "You've won!"

Tonight, it was my doctor who - although he's a very nice, gentle man - used nasty words like "problematic" and "perhaps not as innocuous as scar tissue" and "surgical intervention." The first step is to try to drain the lung while under fluoroscopy to see if there's a liquid component, but the last time this happened, I developed an often fatal process called "Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome", something that happens so rarely, one really can't anticipate it. Luckily then, I escaped the week or two on a ventilator in induced drug coma required for most to survive.

There's no telling that this would happen again but there's also no certainty that it won't. ARDS usually occurs as a result of lung trauma - sepsis, serious pneumonia, or surgical procedure. This is a bad enough possibility that my mind hasn't even moved past to consider what it means if the huge occlusion in my lung isn't liquid or scar tissue because I'm stuck on the danger inherent in just going further in the diagnostic process.

I'm not even quite sure why I'm sharing this information, to be truthful. But I will tell you I wouldn't wish ARDS on my worst enemy. Grin.