Recovering from Serious Illness Late in Life

When, at age seventy-six, an x-ray inadvertently reveals that he might have lung cancer, the author is sure it must be a mistake. He has never smoked, is physically fit, and has no symptoms. He feels fine.But further testing confirms it is cancer. To remove all the cancer, surgeons unexpectedly have to remove his right lung, leaving him severely short of breath. He wonders what the rest of his life will be like with just one lung. His doctors are not sure how much recovery he can expect. They offer little guidance on how to manage his recovery.The author rejected passively waiting to see what would happen. He educated himself about conventional and alternative approaches and designed his own extensive recovery program that combined physical and breathing exercises. From reading James Nestor’s best-selling Breath, he learned about an approach to breathing reform that had been used widely for asthma sufferers but never for lung surgery recovery. He became, as far as he could tell, the first person to experimentally apply it to that purpose. His results were good.His overall recovery was such that by the end of five months he was able to resume riding his bicycle up a local mountain to the amazement of his doctors. They could not do the feat themselves, despite being much younger with both their lungs intact. Within a year he was feeling better than he had before his unexpected diagnosis.Then, just as his future looked promising, he came down with two heart problems that were not related to his lung surgery. He was rushed into what was supposed to be a minor thirty-minute surgery to correct the problems. As a result of a surgical accident, his right heart ventricle was perforated, necessitating emergency seven-hour open heart surgery to mend the ventricle. During surgery, he had a heart attack and a near-death experience.After being hospitalized for twenty-three days, he had to start a brand-new recovery program using most of the approach from his lung surgery recovery. Four months later, he was once again riding his bicycle up the local mountain.Then, a year after heart surgery, his cancer, which was thought to be cured, returned. It metastasized to Stage IV. It was judged to be now incurable.The book ends with the author having achieved cancer remission just before his eightieth birthday. He relied on the best of conventional and complementary cancer treatment.Instructive hope for cancer and lung and heart surgery patients. This is a patient-written medical memoir that reveals information and perspectives that supplement doctor-written ones. It offers patients instructive experiences that may help their own recoveries.