Dear Readers: It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update, the reason being that I hit another difficult, low spell in the past two weeks, and every time I started to write it resulted in a litany of complaint and woe about my various physical problems. I deemed the resulting drafts too whiny.
So where to begin?
First the very good news … the oncologist says that tests from lab work show that the chemotherapy is working. It is reducing the number of malignant plasma cells in my body. As a bottom line, that’s not too bad.
Second some not-so-good news. On top of everything else (the pain, the chemo effects), the Saturday before last I came down with the flu. A noxious respiratory flu, causing serious congestion in my lungs along with the normal fever, chills, and body aches. (Whining, sorry.) Fortunately, I was prescribed Tamiflu (which I’d never taken before), and it shortened, I think, both the severity and duration of the flu. But because of the flu, I had to take a week off of the chemo, in order to ensure that my immune system would be strong enough to fight off the flu.
Now, the pain story. Despite getting a referral to the palliative care doctor as described in the last post, the pain didn’t improve much. Even with the pain medicine she prescribed, it was so bad that I could barely get up and walk across the room. Plus I started to have a very bad new type of pain, this one in my right groin, a severe, sharp jolt every time I stood up or took a step. When added to the flu, I felt awful. I was stuck in our dreary apartment, alone, so tired and hurt that doing anything more than watching TV (a mistake, I should add, that I’ve since corrected) seemed impossible.
Desperation finally drove me to tell the palliative care doctor that the pain medicine wasn’t working, and to ask her whether the new pain might have a physical cause not related to the cancer. She listened, and she accommodated me, giving me stronger pain medicine, and arranging for an MRI to see what the cause of the new pain might be.
So third, some good news: The new pain regimen is working; the pain isn’t all gone, it’s still what most folks would consider moderately severe, but it is manageable. It doesn’t wear me down to the point where I have no energy to do anything else. I’m sleeping comfortably through the night. My mood has improved tremendously. I can work a bit again. I write blog posts. I enjoy a few things. There’s hope.
Fourth, however, the MRI brought some bad news. I’d assumed, as had the doctors, that the new pain was caused by the same old tumor, even though it was supposed to have shrunk down. But the MRI revealed an entirely different cause — a fracture in my pubic bone. How that happened, I don’t know, although weakening of bones is one of the things that happens in active multiple myeloma patients, as explained here. I’m scheduled Friday to see an orthopedist to see what to do about the fracture. Hopefully it will be something that can just heal on its own over time.
The MRI also found other places where smaller tumors had developed around my pelvis. This is not good, but also not unexpected. None of them require radiation treatment, and they should be killed off over time as a result of the chemotherapy, assuming it continues to be successful.
So, good news, bad news, good news, bad news. I’ve never experienced a time with so many ups and downs. I try to be optimistic, but so many curveballs have been thrown my way in so short a time that I’m not sure whether I’m going to come out of all this OK. The fact is, with everything that’s happened, I may not, which during the times I allow myself to think about it, scares the holy hell out of me.
Which leads to my request. By nature my first inclination when faced with a difficult situation is to hunker down by myself. But when combined with my immobility, I see that is leading to an isolation that is very bad for my spirits. So I am hoping that I can reach out to my friends and colleagues and set up times when I can visit and talk. I’m finding that all the time alone with me and the inside of my brain (as interesting as that can be sometimes) is not serving me well.
To remedy that, I’ve added “SSS Visit” as a category on the “MealTrain” calendar, which you can find at the top the the sidebar. If anyone is interested in lunch or a visit, please sign up. It would be a big help to me.
So that’s the scoop. Stay tuned for further developments. There’s no telling what they might be.
Categories: SSS Health