Prevention of surgery trigged metastasis risk? - 1258994

Hello azuredu and welcome to Grace. I hope your stay will provide you with the understanding you need to get through your treatment and only hear back from you to hear how well your doing post cancer episode years from now. Until then I understand that this will be a bumpy ride full of uncertainties and hopes.

Data doesn't show any kind of real risk for seeding in surgeries for lung cancer. The main thing to know is that you want your surgeon to be one who does lobectomies everyday. As I've come to understand the term dedicated thoracic surgeon is what you want to look for when describing his/her surgery specialty; not a general surgeon who does thoracic surgery or even a cardiothoracic surgeon who is a heart surgeon who also does lung surgery. The point is this surgery is very complicated and to insure best outcomes (shown by real data) you need to see a dedicated thoracic surgeon. The oncology specialists on this site say this again and again. Post thoracotomy syndrome is a complication while not life threatening can be a lifelong nerve damage issue and has been shown to happen more often when thoracotomy is not performed by an expert.

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I hope this helps and don't hesitate to ask more questions.

Best hopes for cure!
Janine
forum moderator

Just a link to leave you with, A lot of the first page or two are about research in molecular mutation. So you may want to weed through some to get to some basics.
http://cancergrace.org/lung/category/lung-cancer/core-concepts/early-st…

Janine's exactly right. The most important thing you can do in the pre-operative period to improve your chances of doing well is to work with a well qualified thoracic surgeon rather than the closest person who might say they do lung cancer surgery.

-Dr. West