First a little background. After his emergency surgery to remove what was most likely a cancerous tumor he had an abdominal and chest CT scan to see if the cancer had spread anywhere else, both scans came up negative. That was around the new year, and he was diagnosed with stage III C colon cancer.
Only a month later we wound up back in the hospital where he was diagnosed with sepsis due to a staph infection that had taken up residence in his port. His Oncologist was worried about an abscess around the surgery site as a possible original location for the staph since he only had the port for 2 weeks, so she ordered an abdominal CT scan. The results were negative, but they thought they saw a blood clot at the very bottom of the lung so a chest CT scan was ordered. Those results came back showing one definite blood clot and two nodules. I wasn’t given a size, but we were told the nodes had a blurry/hazy aura so there were two possibilities: they could be septic embolisms where clumps of the bacteria had set up in the lungs after being pushed there from the port through the heart, or they could be lung mets the bacteria is clinging to. They aren’t definitely cancer because they didn’t have the squiggly arm shapes, but it couldn’t be ruled out. After he finishes 6 weeks of antibiotics they will do another CT scan. If the nodes have shrunk then they were septic embolisms, if not they are most likely cancer.
I’m terrified of the results as lung mets would mean he’s stage IV and I don’t know what that means for his treatment or future. Could cancer nodes really grow that fast, in just a little over a month? I guess they would need to be removed? Can you even biopsy something as small as a node? Is met removal a hard surgery to go through and recover from?
Any insight would be appreciated as Google has been less than helpful. I’m mainly finding studies from ncbi.nlm.nih.gov which is heavy on medical jargon and terrifying as they use terms like “sudden death”.