My mom had what was thought to be an extended flu over the Christmas holiday that just never went away. They did x-rays and cat-scans and found the space between the lungs too wide, a bone spur on a vertebrae pushing on her esophagus which had also become twisted, and a paralyzed vocal cord. So they did a pet scan and found 3 hot spots believed to be cancerous, all in lymph nodes. They did a needle biopsy on the one that was pressing against the vocal cord and the results came back as squamous cell cancer. None of the sites are operable, so they prescribed 7 weeks of radiation and chemo. She does 5 days a week of the radiation, and one day (thursdays) of the chemo. She's now on her 4th or 5th week I believe. They have a positive prognosis on how it should react, but we'll not know until they run new tests after the treatments. Everything else they tested came back OK, and she's considered very healthy for her age. So in testing the upperGI when they had her out, they straightened up the esophagus.