Exclusive: Dad thought long COVID caused his breathing troubles. It was a watermelon-sized tumor in his chest

A month after contracting COVID-19 in January 2021, Nicholas Pastuovic was tired, had a severe cough, experienced hot flashes, and woke in the middle of the night “drenched with sweat.” He worried he developed long COVID and made an appointment with a doctor. Testing revealed a surprising cause of his symptoms — a watermelon-sized tumor in his chest.

“To hear you have cancer is scary,” Pastuovic, 61, of the Chicago suburbs, tells TODAY.com. “(But) I figured that I’m going to find out what I need to do and do it.”

Difficulty breathing, exhaustion

After contracting and recovering from COVID-19 in early January 2021, Pastuovic felt well enough to take an annual trip to Florida with his wife. At dinner on the last day of his trip, he felt very ill.

“I thought I was coming down with the flu because I got hot flashes,” he says. “I went to bed, woke up in the middle of the night just drenched with sweat.” He also experienced a “terrible cough” and felt exhausted all the time. He started losing weight, too. Over the next few months, his symptoms would come and go.

“Probably the worst thing you can do is … use Doctor Google,” he says. “It seemed like what I had from what I googled was what people were experiencing after COVID. It was long COVID.”

By June, Pastuovic’s wife insisted he visit a doctor. The nurse practitioner in the office ordered blood work and scheduled a CT scan for him. His blood work revealed an elevated tumor marker, indicating he might have some type of cancer. The CT scan revealed the location of a tumor in his chest.

“It was a couple weeks later and they did another CT scan and the thing had grown significantly in two weeks,” he says. “It was very fast growing.”

The tumor grew to the size of a small watermelon. Doctors biopsied it to understand the type of cancer it was and discovered it was something called a germ cell tumor, a cancer that forms from nascent reproductive cells. Pastuovic said his tumor was not staged. While germ cells normally migrate to reproductive organs, some of Pastuovic’s did not, which is why the tumor grew in his chest.

“These germ cell tumors are usually from the reproductive organs,” Dr. Zaid Abdelsattar, director of the division of thoracic and lung transplant surgery at Loyola Medicine, tells TODAY.com. “(Pastuovic’s tumor) was in his chest and specifically it’s in the center of his chest behind his breastbone.”

Doctors remain unsure as to why Pastuovic developed a germ cell tumor in his chest.

“I wish we knew why these things happen,” Abdelsattar says. “There are not enough cases worldwide to draw a correlation or association with several risk factors. So, it’s really hard to say. And for him, he never had any family history of this.”

In hindsight, Pastuovic realized that he had trouble breathing for a while.

“It became more labored. That was beside the chronic cough, like a hacking cough,” he says. “It was really hard to get a deep breath in.”

Pastuovic met with doctors at Loyola Medicine in Chicago to learn about his treatment plan which included in-patient chemotherapy. For six days, he would be in the hospital receiving various chemotherapies five of the six days. On the last day, he received fluids before being able to go home. In total, he spent four weeks in the hospital.

“It was brutal,” he says. “A week to 10 days after my first round I had the paramedics in my house taking me back to the hospital because all of my numbers — especially my white blood cell count numbers, would drop.”

He was able to stay home after his subsequent rounds of treatment, though he received a blood transfusion to help bolster his white blood cell count. Between rounds, he cut his hand and developed a blood infection that required another hospital stay. Doctors removed his chemotherapy port at that time because they worried infection would settle there. Luckily, he didn’t need it anymore. Going through chemotherapy during the COVID-19 pandemic felt isolating at times but Pastuovic is grateful for the kindness of the nurses on the oncology floor. He also focused on a goal that kept him motivated through treatment.

“My mindset was, ‘I want to go to Florida in February,’” he recalls.

Before hitting the beach, Pastuovic needed to undergo surgery to remove the remaining cancer. By this time, the tumor was softball-sized.

“The seriousness of the surgery was pretty significant because there were major blood vessels intertwined with this tumor,” he says. “When they got me into the operating room, I thought they were planning a party because there were probably 15, 20 people there.”

After a nine-hour surgery where doctors cracked open Pastuovic’s chest “like open heart surgery,” staff told Pastuovic’s wife the surgery went well. After a few days in the hospital, Pastuovic returned home.

“That was a cakewalk compared to chemo,” he says. “You’re sore but that recovery wasn’t that big of a deal quite frankly.”

Treating a rare cancer in the chest

Pastuovic’s tumor was located in an area where if it continued to grow it could create a lot of problems for him.

“Anything that grows in that area has the potential to invade into the heart, the major blood vessels, the lungs on either side or even the bone,” Abdelsattar, who performed Pastuovic’s surgery, says. “It’s a rare kind of tumor.”

Pastuovic’s tumor grew into the pericardium, the sac surrounding the heart, part of a blood vessel to the lung and his lung. That meant Abdelsattar and his team needed to remove the tumor from his chest surgically. But before he could do that, he treated the cancer with something called VIP chemotherapy, which is “very strong” that works for this type of cancer.

“(It) helps shrink the cancer and it kills the majority of it,” Abdelsattar says. “There’s still residual disease that stays there after it shrinks, and we go ahead and resect it.”

In Pastuovic’s case, doctors removed everything including some of the structures.

“We remove the cancer, we removed part of the blood vessel that supplies the lung, and we removed part of his lung,” Abdelsattar says. “All of it came together as one big block.”

This allowed the team to remove all of the remaining cancer cells.

“The body is amazing so it can take care of most of these things without needing anything to be replaced,” Abdelsattar says. “We did not leave him with any residual deficit or any lack of function.”

Following surgery, Pastuovic had no evidence of disease. While it’s been two years since surgery without any signs of cancer coming back, Abdelsattar says they’ll still monitor him with blood tests and scans for the next three years.

“He’s doing great,” Abdelsattar says. “He went to his daughter’s wedding. All of that would not have been possible if we did not have the team and expertise to do (this surgery).”

‘I live my life a little differently’

Pastuovic’s dream of making it to the beach in February 2022 came true.

“Six weeks after surgery, I was in Florida, walking the beach,” he says.

Doctors also needed to remove a nerve that helps the diaphragm, which means walking can sometimes be challenging.

“Basically, only half of my diaphragm works. So, breathing at times can be a little hard,” he says. “Over time, it has gotten better.”

His breathing improved so much that he was able to walk in Quito, Ecuador, which is more than 9,000 feet above sea level, without breathing heavily.

“I walked up a cathedral, about 150 steps, to get to the top,” he says. “I made it at that elevation.”

It felt like a positive thing to be able to walk with ease above sea level on that trip because Pastuovic was there to walk his daughter down the aisle this summer.

“Everything was great,” he says.

Pastuovic says that before his cancer diagnosis, he often had a negative outlook on life. Being in the hospital for about 40 days, often alone, helped him shift his mindset.

“No matter how bad things are, how negative somebody’s thinking is you can find it in yourself to have some positive thoughts,” he says. “I live my life a little differently (now).”

He says he goes out of his way to compliment people for good service or kind deeds and says he wanted to share his story to thank the medical staff that “saved (his) life.”

“I’m trying to live my life every day like it’s my last day,” he says, “and not dwell on bad stuff,”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com

EMEA Tribune is not involved in this news article, it is taken from our partners and or from the News Agencies. Copyright and Credit go to the News Agencies, email news@emeatribune.com Follow our WhatsApp verified Channel