This afternoon Lisa had her weekly bloodwork done, and they also did an EKG because of her elevated heartrate. Her heart rhythm looks fine, just fast as a resting heart rate (it was 116 today). Most of Lisa's blood test counts are ok, though we got a voicemail message from the nurse later that the doctor wants to put Lisa on a magnesium supplement prescription... we don't know why, but we'll call in the morning and find out.

After the oncology visit, we went to have a chest x-ray done and talk to the cardio-thoracic surgeon that did Lisa's laser bronchoscopy procedures and her lung and lymph biopsies. We wanted to make sure that the cause of Lisa's cough wasn't something that needed his attention. He said at this time it's probably not of much value to go in and "clean out" what's accessible, and her x-ray actually looked pretty good to him, all things considered. The amount of pleural effusion (fluid) isn't worrisome at this point, and what's probably causing her worsening coughing is that the upper lobe of the lung with the primary tumor has shrunk down and partially collapsed in upon itself. This isn't necessarily a serious problem on its own, since this is fairly common when heavy radiation is given even if the tumor dies off, and Lisa does still have enough working lung and she's staying well-oxygenated.

When we'd finished with our questions and discussion, I asked if we could look at the x-ray and have him explain what we were seeing. He said, "When you look at it, you'll be blown away." Both Lisa and I initially took that as very negative, but what he was referring to was that it looked so much BETTER (!) than the previous x-ray he had side-by-side. The primary tumor is almost invisible compared to what it used to be, and that is very encouraging. Of course, these are x-rays and they're not as definitive nor detailed as a CT/scan or MRI, but what we saw certainly looked drastically improved as far as tumor size compared to the chest x-ray from several months ago.

The thoracic surgeon is going to do some checking with another lung specialist about the coughing issue and possible approaches, but meanwhile suggested that Lisa take Mucinex-DM to loosen up whatever fluid is in her chest that gets clogged behind airways that are partially closed off by tumor or scar tissue.