Being honest with herself, Sharon admits that she had been having breathing problems for quite awhile before she went to a doctor. She’ll also tell you that until the day she went she had also been a heavy smoker —for 45 years. But then, she had come from a family that just didn’t go to their doctors all that often. She had been healthy for most of her life, and her mom had lived to be 88.
But things were different that July day. She really was having a great deal of trouble breathing and asked her husband to pick her up from work so that she could go to his cardiologist. She thought about going to the emergency room, but this was the one doctor who Sharon felt she could really trust.
At the cardiologist’s office she was given a stress test, and the test itself actually made Sharon very ill. So she was asked to come back the next morning for more tests, including an echocardiogram. That test revealed that Sharon’s pericardium (the sac that surrounds her heart) was filled with fluid. So she was sent immediately to St. John Hospital and admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU).
There they performed several more tests, including an X-ray that showed she had lung cancer. An entire team of physicians was immediately assigned to treat her. The team included a surgeon, a medical oncologist and a radiation oncologist. She spent the next 10 to 12 days at the hospital being treated for the fluid in her heart and lungs. She also had a port installed so that once the fluid was drained, she could begin her chemotherapy treatments.
Sharon was told by her oncologist, Dr. Rajendra Manam, that because of her stage of cancer she would not be able to receive radiation or surgery to treat the tumor. The cancer cells were in the fluid in her lung so only chemotherapy could be used. Doctor Manam had some good news for her, however. He told her that because she was in otherwise excellent health, she was eligible to be part of a clinical trial for a new kind of cancer drug.
Sharon did very well in the clinical trial, which lasted six months. However, when the drug dosage was reduced to a maintenance level, the tumor started growing back. So Dr. Manam switched her to a new kind of drug—a drug that wasn’t even available just three years before. But luckily for Sharon, now that the drug is on the market, her tumor is once again under control. The new drug is also less toxic than many other drugs used in chemotherapy, so Sharon can continue to take it as her maintenance drug and the side effects are minimal.
When asked about Dr. Manam and the ICU team that treated her, the praise flows freely. “He’s the greatest” she insists. “I put all my trust in him. He doesn’t sugarcoat it; he just tells it like it is. I just feel very confident and very safe with him. He’s such a wonderful, wonderful person.”
