Pain management

During later stages of mesothelioma—the asbestos-related lung cancer—you will probably need extra help with pain management. Pain may come from the disease itself and sometimes as a side effect to the treatments you’ve been given. Either way, you deserve to live pain-free and as comfortable as possible.

Discuss with your doctor what your options are for medical pain management. But you can also consider other methods such as various physical, self-help and alternative therapies.

Thoracic pain
Difficulty breathing and shortness of breath are not uncommon with you have chest (thoracic) pain with primary malignant pleural mesothelioma. The buildup of fluid from the tumor (pleural effusion, “fluid in the lungs”) can compress tissue and nerves inside and cause thoracic pain in the lower back or the side of the chest. Medical methods of pain management may include treatment with thoracic radiography and withdrawing fluid from the chest to decrease pressure (pleural aspiration).

Lung cancer pain
Lung cancer—especially mesothelioma—can spread, or metastasize, quickly and may begin to do so very early in disease. It is one of the most difficult types of cancer to treat. Pain management becomes an important part of helping patients through the process—both for the disease symptoms and often for the aftereffects of methods used to treat the disease.

There are three types of pain you might experience: 1) acute pain, when something is hurting—usually short-term—very much and comes on suddenly; 2) chronic pain can be mild to severe and goes on for a long period of time; and 3) breakthrough pain, which happens suddenly to those who are already having chronic pain. Your doctor may give you one of the following types of medicines:

• non-opioids such as aspirin, acetaminophen, and so on for mild to moderate pain
• opioids, which are prescription drugs like oxycodone, morphine, codeine, and so on for moderate to severe pain
• fast-acting prescription drugs such as oral morphine for breakthrough or other sudden acute pain

Because lung cancer pain is treatable, when choosing your care team it’s critical to discuss with them their philosophies of pain management. Make sure that you feel confident they will do everything in their power to keep you as pain-free as possible throughout the course of the disease. Don’t hesitate to ask as many questions as you like to find out what they believe about various pain management approaches.