Last Friday (why does shit always happen on Friday?) I started having terrible, sharp, burning pain in my upper left quadrant, right under my ribs, like a stitch in my side. It hurt to move, it hurt to breathe. I call up Dr. Judy (the office I used to work at) and they tell me to come right over. Sigh. Judy pokes and prods and sends me for an x-ray and ultrasound to rule out pneumonia, pleurisy, something to do with my spleen and just to get a look there. They showed everything was normal. A good thing is that my lungs are clear. The next place my cancer would show up would be in my lungs, then my brain.
I don't even like to write that, feels like bad karma. I will write that the tumors are shrinking and the cancer is being beaten into remission. That will balance it out.
I come home and am just laying down for a nap when the phone rings. It's Judy who says she has set up a VQ scan (some kind of nuclear medicine test) and she really thinks I should go ("If it was me, I'd go" she said) because she wants to rule out a pulmonary embolism. Well, shit. That's serious, but I am only 42!
It's off to St Peters Hospital Nuclear Medicine Department where I inhale a mixture of something radioactive and oxygen and get injected with radioactive dye and get rolled into a big imaging machine.
Luckily, the test ruled out a pulmonary embolism and I was sent home. Comforted somewhat that everything life threatening was ruled out but without a diagnosis for what was causing my pain.
I took pain pills to get me through the past few days and the pain has gone away. I think I pulled or strained a muscle there, though I haven't exerted myself in months. Maybe I just slept all twisted in a Ambien induced stupor.
Today I started Round 5 of chemo. Almost halfway there. Except for my lips feeling full of Novocaine and some tingling fingertips when they are exposed to the cold, I feel pretty good. There is protein in my urine (Avastin can wreck havoc on the kidneys) so I am doing a 24 hour urine test. That's when I collect all of my pee in 24 hours and put it in a big orange Hazmet comtainer that is kept in the fridge. Don't mistake it for lemonade, Dan!
