Andrea Forman can't talk enough about her trip to Europe with her daughter
Haily. It was a graduation present. >> I said, pick a big trip and let's go somewhere
and she's always wanted to see London so I said well then you know let's do
London and while we're going there we should probably try to see Paris for a
few days. >> A date was sent they would fly to England in June. >> We started planning
in January and we were watching YouTube videos on different things to learn. I
bought all of our subway like, tube cards they call them I pre purchase those we
mapped out all the subways the tours we wanted to do, you know, the tickets for
the show. >> A perfect plan that almost didn't happen.
>> It was soon after Easter, I started, I had a cough for just a couple weeks and it
didn't seem to go away and I went to the doctor. >> Doctors initially treated Andrea
with allergy medication. >> They thought it was allergies and the cough went away but
I said I was having trouble, like getting full breath and I said when I was laying
down I heard like a cranky sound and he said, you know you might have fluid. So
they sent me for a CT scan and that's when they found a tumor on my
lung. >> Here we have the tumor in her right upper lobe and at the bottom of her
right lung, you can see the fluid that was causing her a lot of the shortness
of breath that she had when she first came in. >> They found it was lung cancer
which shocked me because I don't smoke. I've never even been around smoke. I just
had no idea why I would have gotten that. >> Doctors diagnosed Andrea with Stage four
lung cancer. >> I was completely reck. I in fact, I just I
couldn't even drive home that night. It was terrible.
>> Andrea's next thought was her daughter. >> I had told my doctors I had this big trip
planned for my daughter, it was a gift. So they reassured me that I will make it on
that trip but we're going to have to hustle with all the testing and
everything I had to have done before I left. >> So she had an initial PET scan
which is kind of a kind of looking at everything. Looking at the big picture, it
doesn't really give you a lot of specifics but kind of gives you an
overall picture and there was some concern that there may have been
something in the brain and that prompted additional imaging of the brain which
then revealed three small areas of the brain that that were concerning for what
we call metastatic tumors. Or tumors that have spread from somewhere else and gone
to the brain. >> The day before I was leaving I took a vacation day just to
finalize everything and it was noon, around noon when she called me and said,
you know are you all ready for your trip? I said yeah, you know, we're all ready and
she said well I just want to let you know you know, try not to get upset but
we found three small spots on your brain. And I just I turned white. I just was
like but I'm leaving tomorrow. >> So her symptoms were actually quite
well-managed and I felt comfortable letting her go on vacation which I know
was very important to her and her daughter and we could hold the treatment
until she returned two weeks later. >> She said I really feel confident that we're
gonna get it and there's a procedure called Gamma Knife so she said you have
a great time, you and your daughter and we want to hear about your trip and
we'll see you when you come back. >> And when they returned home from their trip,
Andrea knew there was a plan. >> So I came back on a Friday night and that Monday I
met with Dr. Zecharia and then he was very calming, very reassuring to me and
he said we're gonna do your procedure the next day, Tuesday. So I really didn't
have time to worry or think . >> More and more we've gone towards doing a really
focused targeted radiation treatment for this. We called radius surgery and
specifically called gamma knife radius surgery. And what that entails is focused
targeted radiation that's aimed just at the abnormal areas we see on the MRI.
These are invisible beams of power and it's 192 individual sources
of radiation that each individually really don't cause any damage but when
they converge and meet in a single point can cause injury to that specific area.
>> He said, it's a procedure he's done so many times. He's very confident that he
couldn't he can get the spots. >> Andrea went back to work a day after the radio
surgery. >> I just can't even believe things like this exist. I would have thought it
would have been invasive and it wasn't >> A high-tech procedure that's making a
difference for Andrea. >>We're one month follow-up scan looked excellent it's
like decreasing the size of all the tumors that we treated with no other new
tumors. >> He said you know, I have great news there there's no more spots, we did
get it that time and you're good to go he said I'll see you in another three
months. So it was a good day.