What is up with this? Two cases this week? See the abnormality above? I feel like the friggin’ grim reaper!!!!
Again I had to tell a guy he is totally screwed. Even though he had quite smoking 5 years ago when he was forty, the damage of doing that for 25 years was done…..
I realize how very lucky and very stupid I am ( ! I know how it is to try to quit, it is extremly difficult and I know people who after 25 years or more have quit cold turkey and they admitted it was just in their mind! I also know people who have tried everything under the sun to try to quit and couldn’t even stand to go an hour without having one! everyone is different, for some it wasn’t too bad, a walk in the park!! and other’s ( like myself)even with trying everything to help me stop! I cannot judge other’s or compare how they did it so I could do it too! I am lucky because I recently had a chest X-Ray to determine if I had pnemonia. the result? negative! and the doc told me my lungs were in such good shape and clear as water, I sure as heck did not tell him I was a smoker, I knew he would have ripped me a new one if I did!
I just dropped my smokeless tobacco habit after 6 years, I’m 19 now, hopefully I have a tobacco-free life ahead of me.
Wasn’t as difficult as I expected, after watching 3 family members die in the last 6 months of tobacco-related illness, I decided it was time to stop.
Sorry about your week ERP.
-Guil
While I know what a chest x-ray looks like, I’m no doctor and don’t know how to read an abnormal x-ray, what’re we looking at doc and where in the lung?
I think there is a mass in the mid right lung field (your left, the patient’s right). When I first started working as a hospitalist seven years ago I saw a mass just like this one that no one else had commented on, including a radiologist. I had to go to the reading room to ask them if what I was seeing was faking me out or if I was really seeing a mass.
I was really seeing a mass. And they couldn’t believe it.
Yep. That is it. Right upper lobe lower segment mass. Turns out he also had one on the left seen only on CT.
HARD CORE!!! You have an interesting job. …..WOW!
Smokers: Take them vitamins!!! At least 500mg of vitamin C, but 1000mg per-day may be in store depending on diet.
THEN QUIT!
-disclaimer-
I smoke. …Ouch!
Good luck to us all!
-b-
My Mother passed away from lung cancer in January. She had smoked from 15-52yrs old. They found the lung on…you guessed it X-ray when she had pneumonia. She went on to have part of her left lung removed, chemo, and radiation. This past November we realized the cancer was not gone and had in fact spread to her brain. She died from this.
I absolutely hate cigarettes!!! I think all cigarette and tobacco companies should be sued for genocide. Extreme maybe.
Grim reaper, hell yeah! That sucks for the patient but I’m sure you delivered the news with some heart in it. I had a week where I had two young people diagnosed with lymphomas through there ER visits and that sucked.
Thanks for another good post.
I’m pretty sure that the cigs were the Grim Reaper.
I had a shift like that oh, say, Monday.
I had a patient who’s cancer became wildly metastatic (now on hospice), a guy driving across a bunch of states with an acute divertiuclitis that i couldn’t let go home, a guy with a weird kidney disorder that was stable, for years, until his Cr suddenly became 11.5 from his baseline 4…hello dialysis!
I hate days where everything ends up being all grim-reaper like.