Back toUpdated on October 23, 2024
After a life-changing lung cancer diagnosis, Ed was told he only had a few weeks left to live. Watch Oncology Nurse Navigator Carey Baumann speak with Ed and his wife, Linda, about their fight for survival and the importance of having a caregiver.
Medically reviewed in February 2020.
Transcript
My goal is to die of old age, not lung cancer. [MUSIC PLAYING]
I'm Carey Baumann. I'm an oncology nurse navigator. And Ed, Why don't you tell us about your cancer, your cancer
story? One day in New York, I got a terrible back pain. I couldn't get my pants on.
It took 45 minutes just to get my pants on. It ended up, ultimately, that I had advanced lung cancer.
It had metastasized. I had tumors everywhere. Everywhere. It was so bad the x-rays showed up [INAUDIBLE] pretty
much everywhere. I was told that I only had a couple of weeks, maybe a month to live.
I just went into a black hole. You are told that you're going to die, so now you don't know what's going on in your life.
All you know is tremendous fear. That's where I still go back to the caregiver
is critical to keeping a person alive. How does the role as a caregiver for Ed, how does that work for you?
Being a caregiver is a lot more difficult than people realize, because he's
focusing on trying to get well and dealing with his treatments and the side effects that he has from those things, while I'm taking care of him,
making sure he's eating and making his appointments for all the different doctors that he has to see,
and also at the same time, trying to look to the future and seeing what possible treatments are out there that
would be something that he might be able to use in the future. He has totally surprised me at how he's taken having cancer
because I really didn't think he would deal with it very well at all. But he has been so strong and has never
lost his will to fight and to live on and that's why I fight so hard to keep him in treatment, because I know that he doesn't want to die of cancer.
He wants to die of old age. And so my goal is to make sure that happens. She's the reason I'm still alive
and I've been through a lot, believe me. But 16 years later, I'm still alive. Still alive. [MUSIC PLAYING]
