Page 28 - CF Roundtable - Winter/Spring 2026

TRANSPLANT TALK
By: Colleen Adamson
I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN
THERE WOULD BE MORE CANCER
When last I left off in the Autumn 2024
CFR, I was recovering from a lobectomy
for lung cancer in July 2024. I also
had some superficial squamous cell
cancer (SCC) scraped off my head. No
big deal.
Well, it became a very big deal very
quickly. A bump started to form where
the scraping had been done. I took a
picture and sent that to the doctor who
had done the scraping. He brought
me in and did a culture. Long story
short, this thing grew fast and was
literally sucking the blood out of me,
so much so that I became anemic and
completely exhausted. Taking a shower
was draining (pun intended); I couldn’t
do anything else except lie on the
couch. At the beginning of September
2024, I had the SCC growth removed
but the surgeon could not get all the
cancer out safely, and it came back
two weeks later. I then saw a radiation
oncologist as well as an oncologist.
They decided the best treatment plan
was to do proton therapy. However,
the tumor was growing so fast that the
measurements were obsolete within
a week. I did a couple of rounds of
chemotherapy to try to slow the tumor
growth down, but that didn’t work. In
desperation, I sent the tumor picture to
my head and neck cancer surgeon (he
had removed a very aggressive SCC
from my head in 2011) and explained
the situation. He replied immediately
and said it looked like he would need
to do another surgery on me. Yay!
I had the tumor removed at the end
of October. This time, the surgeon got
most of it out but there were a few
microscopic cancer pieces on the dura
of my brain that he did not want to
touch for fear of giving me a stroke. To
cover the spot left over from the tumor
removal, he took a big piece of skin off
my wrist along with a vein for a blood
supply. Unfortunately, I have small
vessels and that skin ended up dying. I
had another surgery in early December
to replace the dead skin with skin and
a vein from my other wrist, and that
healed beautifully.
No rest for the weary though. I had a
CT scan of my lungs in mid-December
and to my surprise, my lungs were full
of cancer. “Too many nodules to count”
was one of the findings. I assumed
my lung cancer came back, but nope.
It was the SCC from my head, which
metastasized to my lungs. I really
thought I was done for. I immediately
started getting rid of stuff, thinking
about what my husband needed to
know once I was gone. It was very
rough and by mid-January I was in
a deep depression. My psychiatrist
increased my depression medication,
and it took a couple of months, but I
was feeling better mentally by the
end of March. I was so anxious about
cancer and dying that I lost 15 lbs that
I could not afford to lose. Christmas
presents for my friends were left
unwrapped because I just could not do
anything, even something as simple as
that. It was horrible. I am now doing
immunotherapy, which scared me to
death when I started it in February 2025,
because I have transplanted lungs
and a transplanted kidney. Essentially
turning on my immune system could
have caused my transplanted organs to
go into rejection, and if that happened,
I would die. But, I’m happy to say, so far
so good! Most of my cancer is gone,
and my lungs and kidney are doing fine.
I don’t know what the next day or the
next test will show, so I take one day at
a time and enjoy feeling good enough
to travel and get back to volunteering.
Thank goodness I was retired. And
thank goodness we did not get another
dog. We were both exhausted every
day, especially when I was in the
hospital and Scott was there every
day, all day. He had to drive me to all
my appointments. I had to stop all my
volunteer work. If I was still working, I
would have had to take leave without
pay because I surely would have used
up any sick leave I had left. I barely had
any energy, nowhere near enough to
also do my high-stress job. I always
knew I could only reach a certain level
at work and never applied for jobs
I knew my health would eventually
keep me from doing. That was my
reality, and yes people questioned (and
understood) that decision, but I never
did. I’m grateful for the jobs I have had
over the years but I’m also grateful for
being retired during the fight of, and for,
my life.
28 CF Roundtable Winter/Spring 2026