After a malignant mesothelioma diagnosis, or when you visit your doctor’s office with potential symptoms of malignant mesothelioma, one of the first steps is often to determine whether you are eligible for a surgical procedure. Surgical procedures tend to fall into two different categories: exploratory surgery to identify areas that are potential abnormalities and to take biopsies, and treatment surgeries in early stages to remove ...
After you have discussed various options for surgery with your medical team and you have reached the decision to undergo a specific surgical procedure related to your mesothelioma, it will be important to know what to expect and how you can prepare. At this point, the surgical procedure is likely planned and scheduled, and you have already undergone a series of tests and consultations to ...
One of the most common forms of treatment after a mesothelioma diagnosis is radiation therapy. There are many benefits to utilizing this method of treatment, but it is also important as a patient to understand what you should expect during and after the use of this therapy. Your medical team can provide additional information about radiation and other forms of treatment to help develop the ...
The process of mesothelioma diagnosis seems like an endless series of tests, some of which require anesthesia or even hospitalization. By the time you even begin treatment for mesothelioma, you may feel like, in the past few months, you have had more doctors’ appointments, blood tests, and X-rays, than at any other time in your life. There are still more tests before the doctors can ...
One of the main elements of a prognosis following a diagnosis of mesothelioma is the survival rate. Survival rates vary based on a number of different factors, and the rate in your case could vary substantially to someone else even if there are some similarities between patients. The following explains the variety of factors that influence survival rates of mesothelioma patients and what the rates ...
Being young and healthy is one of the things in life that you do not appreciate until they are gone. There was probably a time in your life when you visited a doctor once per year, if even that often, and at the end of the visit, the doctor simply said, “see you next year,” perhaps with a warning that you should lose weight in ...
After a diagnosis of mesothelioma by your doctor, one of the first discussions with the medical team will be about the prognosis of the case. Medical professionals often use a lot of terminology that non-medical lay people do not understand, and prognosis can be one of those terms. Your prognosis often dictates a substantial amount of what will happen in terms of treatment and outlook ...
In the weeks or months since a chest X-ray revealed something unusual on or near your chest wall, you have probably thought more about the intricacies of the human body than you ever had before. Unless you work in certain subfields of medicine, you probably have not thought about cell division or apoptosis since high school biology class, and now you are acutely aware of ...
What Should I Know About Medical Records, and How Do I Manage Them? When you have been diagnosed with a form of mesothelioma, or you are seeing a health care provider due to symptoms associated with mesothelioma, it is essential to keep detailed medical records. While medical offices are required to retain medical records, you should be sure to maintain your own copies of your ...
Many types of cancers (like mesothelioma) spread through either direct invasion or the lymph nodes. With unique exceptions, mesothelioma does not spread to a person’s central nervous system. Instead, this condition grows in the cavities where it originates. Following metastasis, pleural mesothelioma can end up completely encasing the lung and spreading throughout the chest by involving the heart, esophagus, and opposing lung. Fatalities Due to ...
