I'm sorry you're going through this! I have a story extremely similar to yours. January 5th of this year I went to bed started wheezing and spit out a bunch of blood. I went to the er, they did a CT scan right away, and the CT scan showed a 5.7 cm. Mass on my right upper lobe. They said it had been there a while and of course they thought it was cancer. I was beside myself with grief I take care of my five-year-old granddaughter I'm all she has.

I imagine the worst, and I was living in absolute tear! The next thing my doctors did was a pet scan the pet Scan also showed that the mass was hypermetabolic, so it looked like cancer but the pet Scan also was saying that it seemed to be more of an infection than cancer which was a little shocking. So then they scheduled me for the bronchoscopy and once the doctor got in there they could see that I had a horrible infection in a lot of my lung and he poked around in that Mass but really couldn't tell what that was so they took some biopsies, and a few days later I found out that I had Klebsiella pneumoniae, and about 3 weeks after that I found out I had MAC, Mycobacterium Avium Complex, which is in the family of TB but it's a lung infection that causes cavities to form in your lung, (which is what my mass actually was) but it can be treated with antibiotics once they find out you have it. It's very slow going and can take years before someone notices it on a CT scan by accident, and some people get symptoms like coughing or being very tired, there's a long list. I had no symptoms except for the coughing of blood and I had a pretty big mass.

I hope that you don't have cancer, I know what it's like to live in that terror and it taking forever to get these tests done. I had to wait almost 4 weeks to get the bronchoscopy done and then another five days to find out that I had a pneumonia and another 3 weeks before I found out I had Mac because they grow the cultures in a petri dish. It takes a while for them to see if you have a weird infection!!!

If you have any more questions I'll answer anything the best I can. But I pray that it's something other than cancer, and I am absolute proof that it can be something else because everyone including my doctors thought that I had cancer on my lung. I am 52 years old and smoked for 30 years but quit a few years ago. I will never forget the terror and the fear I felt during those weeks, and I don't wish that upon anyone so I pray for you to have some peace in your heart and to know that this can very well be an infection.

Many strange things have been going around since covid, you just don't know. And try to stay off the internet I'm reading about things because you will just scare yourself right into a corner!!!

The best thing I can tell you to do is try to just accept whatever's happening at this moment right now since the waiting for tests and on results take forever and you're not going to get the answers immediately ! The more I accepted things, the better things were.
Angela