Hi scubabunny:
I can certainly understand your thirst for knowledge. It's a very scary time. I have some suggestions that might help.
When I deal with patients coping with complex medical illnesses they often need help dealing with the doctors. I tell them that one of their first steps should be to "buy a Big Chief tablet and a Number 2 pencil and keep it on the kitchen table". They are going to be swamped with information and they'll probably have many questions. They'll likely have
so many questions that they won't remember them all. The best way to remember questons is to write them down as you think of them and bring them with you to the doctor's office. I discourage patients from taking notes while I'm talking because it seems to keep many people from really
listening, but the tablet is handy for jotting notes right after the visit. It really helps to bring a second set of ears to the office visits too. A friend or family member listening to the same information at the same time is very helpful. I don't object to people bringing pocket recorders to the office, but I guess it might make some doctors too self-conscious.
As far as finding out more information on your own is concerned, the first step is to know what you're looking for. There are
many many kinds of cancer that behave in different ways. There are even many different kinds of
lung cancer, and even within a single kind of lung cancer the disease can present differently and affect people differently. When looking up information on cancer, you need to know the specific
kind of cancer. I think that the best way to get the information on what kind of cancer you're dealing with is to ask the doctor for copies of any pathology reports from biopsies. The reports will give the name of the cancer and probably some additional information on that specific cancer too. It would help if the doctor would take the time to translate the doctor-talk on the report into English, but it's the big words on the report that you'll need for an accurate search.
The Internet can be an excellent source for research. I personally feel that more trustworthy information is likely to come from websites ending in .gov or .edu, but some .com or .org sites have excellent info too. Try a good search engine like Google (
http://www.google.com/) for starters. US government websites like the National Institutes of Health (
http://www.nih.gov/health/) and National Cancer Institute (
http://www.nci.nih.gov/) are good resources for reliable information. The NCI even has links to other websites (
http://www.nci.nih.gov/cancer_information/doc_img.aspx?viewid=f4e8091b-d873-4b3f-9658-a2489f9ff8e1) and a primer to help you get good information off the web.
Unfortunately answering specific questions about any individual's health or answering questions privately by email is beyond the scope of my own participation on Scubaboard. IMHO your parents need to ask your father's doctors and nurses those questions. But I'll be glad to try to answer general questions as they relate to diving here, if I think I might be able to help.
Hope this helps,
Bill
