Welcome to our CaringBridge website. We are using it to keep family and friends updated in one place. We appreciate your support and words of hope and encouragement. Thank you for visiting. At the beginning of July, Stu was sent to Waconia Hospital for pneumonia. He had a large pocket of fluid that had collected outside the base of his lung. The doctors drained that fluid but saw cancerous cells in the fluid they drained. He then had surgery where they apply talc to adhere the lung back to the lung lining sac where the fluid had accumulated between and took a few tissue samples during that surgery as well. We all met with an oncologist (ironically the same oncologist that Judy had) and were told that he has Adenocarcenoma of the lung. They are not quite sure on the treatment yet. He is having an MRI on Tuesday to determine if a spot they saw on his PET scan (imaging scan that looks for rapidly dividing cells) in his spine is a malignant area or if it just simply arthritis. They are also running a few more tests on the tissue samples they took to determine if he is a candidate for targeted therapy instead of just chemotherapy. Targeted therapy medications are newer types of cancer treatments and they are very specific to certain types of cancer and tend to have less side effects because it targets the tumor and the healthy cells are not damaged like traditional chemotherapy. However, it has to be a very specific type of cancer in order to use these medications. We will all meet with his oncologist again on Monday August 6th to find out the results of the MRI and the further testing and to decide on what the course of treatment will be. He isn’t having any pain but is just very tired and deconditioned from being in the hospital for two weeks. Please keep Stu in your thoughts and prayers please.
