"Are you sitting down?"

My sister Suzy asked me. It was November 19th of last year, my sister Missy's birthday, and I was on the phone with Suzy. When someone asks you that question, you know what they have to say can't be good. And it wasn't. "I'm with Mom at the doctor's office, and they did some tests and... she has lung cancer." The words shot through me and I immediately sat down. She continued on, explaining what the doctor had said, but I didn't hear any of it. My mind, like always, immediately went into overdrive, analyzing the past, present and future all at once. I've already lost my dad, I couldn't bear to think about... Finally she said, "Mandie, are you still there?" "I think I already knew it." I replied, and explained. Just a month ago I had had an IM conversation with Missy where I expressed my concern that the constant coughing she had could be something serious, like cancer. My mom has been a chronic cougher for as long as I can remember, but this past year it seemed to have gotten worse. She frequently visited the neighborhood doctor who tried to "fix" her with all sorts of allergy meds and such, but it didn't get better. Finally she decided to go to a pulminary specialist, and that's where she was diagnosed with cancer.

The doctor said the cultures were going to the lab for confirmation, but the mass inside her lung was pretty big and he was quite certain the diagnosis was grim. So a few days later they called Mom back and told her they needed her to come back in to get a better sample, because what they didn't culture enough of the mass. So they repeated the steps, and after the holiday they called her back and said they couldn't find cancer in what they had cultured. So he advised her to either a) do exploratory surgery or b) get a second opinion. She chose option b. But this time, all the wiser, she called a friend of hers who is a renowned radiologist at Harrist Methodist and he hooked her up with a good doctor. This new doctor was very thorough with his testing and discovered that the mass in her lungs wasn't cancer, it was a fungus. A fungus. He said it could have simply started by aspirating a piece of corn or something, and because foreign objects don't leave the lungs, it stayed there and, well, grew. My mom said she has been coughing like this since she was 11 years old. Could this fungus have started when she was 11? There's no way to tell.

So the doctor put her on an extremely strong antibiotic to kill the fungus, and inflated the portion of the lung that had collapsed from the trauma. We found out she was cancer free right before Christmas. What a great Christmas present.

Anyway, the doctor was afraid that she might have a syndrome called Wegeners, and he was also afraid that her lung would cave in again. Just a few days ago she went back for a follow up and found out that she does NOT have Wegeners, and her lung, for the most part, has stayed inflated. Her fungus is almost completely cleared up, her coughing has decreased dramatically, she's breathing better, and the best part of all... it's not cancer.