Got diagnosed couple weeks ago with stage II pleural. Been doing alot of reading and I'm seeing all these different timelines online. Nobody can really tell me straight how long I had that stuff in my lungs before it started causing problems.
I worked HVAC from 1975 to 2000, mostly doing ductwork in commercial buildings. Dallas area. Didn't even think about asbestos back then, everybody was around it. Started getting shortness of breath maybe 6 months ago, figured it was just getting old. Went to the doc for something else and they found it on the x-ray.
So that's 25 years of exposure and then another 25 years before I felt anything. That's what the literature calls the latency period I guess. Just seems crazy that something could be sitting in your chest that long and you don't know.
Anybody else here got a timeline they can share? Like when you were exposed versus when you started noticing stuff? Trying to figure out if I'm dealing with something that's been brewing for decades or if I'm lucky it showed up sooner.