A Life - Saved!

As a physician, I know that our days are filled with decisions. A fateful decision Dr. Meinhold made was to screen my wife and me for coronary artery disease with CT angiogram. My wife's study showed clear coronary arteries but a hazy shadow in the left lower lobe of the lung. My wife had no respiratory symptoms, and it would have been easy to write this off as "scar tissue." When a CT scan of the chest showed slight enlargement of the shadow, she underwent lung biopsy. This showed lung cancer, and the decision was made to remove the left lower lobe. The pathology showed a stage 2 adenocarcinoma of the lung with no extension outside the tumor itself. She underwent a course of chemotherapy and is doing fine. The oncologist feels my wife has been cured of her cancer (but of course time will tell). Had we waited for symptoms to develop - cough or chest pain - staging of her tumor and thus her prognosis would have been must less hopeful. Our eternal thanks go to Dr. Meinhold for screening for heart disease and following up on an unexpected finding in the left lung.