I had an appointment today with a radiologist, Dr. Olds. I have to say I was pretty impressed with her thoroughness and unhurried approach.
She examined me pretty thoroughly and said--basically--that she sees no compelling reason to employ radiation treatment to shrink any lymph nodes. She does not think the two enlarged lymph nodes just above my Adam's apple are the cause of my windpipe problems when trying to sleep.
She said--surprise, surprise--that she thinks the real cause is enlarged tonsils!
O.K., then, what are the options for fixing that? Remove them? She telephoned Dr. Lee (right then and there), the ear, nose, throat surgeon who removed the two lymph nodes for biopsy, and the two of them concluded that removal of the tonsils was probably not a good idea.
"Could the tonsils be getting enlarged as a part of the lymphoma?" I asked.
She said it was unlikely, but the only way to know for certain was to do a partial removal for biopsy and if you were going to that much work, you might as well completely remove them, which they had already concluded was not a good idea. Apparently tonsils are not commonly removed nowadays, even in kids, and it is an especially bad idea in adults.
I need to do more reading about that.
So what does that leave for "fixing" the sleep problem? Maybe "more of same," which, lately, has been a pre-bedtime routine of benadryl, Listerine gargling, menthol cough drops, and breathing strips across the nose (to open up a deviated septum from an old broken-nose baseball injury). OR get one of those CPAP air pumps that the sleep clinic prescribed (but almost killed me) and try to get used to it.
Lots to think about.
How ironic: my sleep problem had nothing whatever to do with the lymphoma, apparently. The lymphoma just happened to get discovered along the way.
