Hi @colleenyoung - Thank-you for the welcome. I’ve been meaning to get in touch, again with the encouragement of @llwortman. What a bright light she is to all who battle serious health challenges... and she and her husband have become wonderful new friends to our family.

To answer your question about my Mother’s present treatment regimen:

With confirmation from the Mayo thoracic surgeon that we met with that my Mom is not a surgical candidate, she returned home to start her chemo-radiation program. The doc at Mayo will review repeat-imaging taken through the course of her treatment to determine whether there’s any sort of surgical opportunity afterwards. I understand that the window for surgery post-treatment is quite narrow which means the assessment will fall into a tight timeline at the 4 week mark after radiation concludes.

She is starting week 2 of concurrent treatment today. It’s chemo and radiation today, and daily radiation through the rest of the week. She has 6 cycles of this, and then optional chemo in weeks 9 and 12.

My mother’s case is challenging because it’s ‘locally-advanced’ in the area of her upper right lung. Mayo is currently undertaking genomic and immuno ‘checkpoint inhibitor’ testing of biopsy sample to look for targetable mutations or proteins such as PD-L1. The Mayo medical oncologist who we met with believes that there is a reasonable shot in finding a mutation, as my Mom has a ‘remote smoking history... she quit 40 years ago.

So, we all await the results of the testing and hope that it will offer another avenue of treatment approach down the road. I’d be interested in hearing from others who have received targeted drug therapies. It certainly seems to be a very promising area of treatment. In fact, there is a paradigm shift underway between the traditional standard first-line IV chemo approach and new ‘smart’ oral drugs that seek out target-positive tumour sites. This is really exciting stuff.