I have lung cancer and my health care professional wants to do a surgical resection (removal of the tumor). How do I know if this is the right thing to do?
Do not submit to any procedure until you are clear and have all the answers to your questions. Be aware, however, that if surgery is being considered for lung cancer, it is a good sign, signifying that the degree of tumor involvement or spread is probably limited. Also, you should consider getting a second opinion. Your health care professional should not be offended by this suggestion and, in fact, might encourage it. He or she should conduct a pulmonary function test before surgery; this test helps identify patients with extremely high surgical risk. Also, cardiopulmonary exercise testing may be helpful to determine whether or not you can withstand the rigors of this surgery. A widespread misconception is that lung surgery exposes tumors to the air, which makes them spread. This is absolutely false. Because some patients who undergo surgery later have cancer recurrences, the assumption is that the surgery caused the spread. In fact, in those cases the spread occurred microscopically
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