Q: What are the symptoms of mesothelioma?
A: Mesothelioma is a disease that comes in many shapes and sizes, and you have to be vigilant. I remember one of the men in Las Vegas who was an umpire and father of baseball players my son was playing with. All he had was weight loss and a little bit of pain, and they sort of said they got worse and worse. So, it can be very subtle, but usually the common symptoms are chest pain, shortness of breath, and weight loss. But it’s hard to say this is it. It’s like anything else that cancer does: It usually does it fairly slowly over time and patients sometimes don’t realize that they’re getting sick. They’ll say, you know, “I thought it was kind of good to lose 20 pounds.” I know that’s not okay, but sometimes they’re quite happy with weight loss, until their wife says “Hey, how come you’re not feeling so good?” so it is something. Sometimes, there are certain patients that stand out and those patients are the ones who do very well for very long periods of five or six years. I can’t say that I’ve had anybody who’s been cured with chemo but we have had a number of patients who have had chemotherapy, then surgery and radiotherapy, and they have done exceptionally well. We always look for those patients, those exceptional responders. You go on to do very, very well for a long time.
