6 years with stage IV metastatic, now pneumonia

Hi,

I rushed my 73 year old mom to the ER for pneumonia on Sunday and they admitted her. She has had 6 years of every treatment possible and the last 2 years on navelbene and zometa. Her tumor markers have gone down but she does have bone (4 spinal tumors), liver tumors, spleen and they said they found something on her lung long ago but never could determine what it was.

So she's getting 3 antibiotics for her pneumonia and within a day her cough sounds better. She was in excrutiating pain with her cough, her legs gave out where she couldn't lift them, no fever though, green/yellow sputum, confusion, weakness, moaning, and the coloring on her was awful. To me she looked like she was dying.

She's more stable now, her cough sounds better but they keep going back and forth on the pnumonia diagnosis. They want her to get a lung CT to see what congestion is in the lower lobes. What could that be? Pneumonia enduesed pluracy or edema? They also said her BNP is high so something is up with her heart. Finally her white cell count is over 20k and they don't know why.

I dont' know what all this means. Is she taking a change for the worse? She's been dealing with cancer for 6 years and I'm wondering if this navelbene option (her last) is pretty much done or she got other serious complications that means that she should just stop chemo and let things happen (her choice lately; she is so done with all of this).

[Paderla Anitha, DNB]

Hello and hope you are doing well.

Understand your predicament. The response to antibiotic therapy for the pneumonia cam be gauzed by the clinical symptoms and the radiological findings. Since she is not totally responding and the radiological findings are varying they may be considering alternate diagnosis like pulmonary edema or pulmonary embolism or secondaries in the lung. Only a lung CT can help differentiate.

Hope this helped and do keep us posted.