Saturday, February 18, 2012

Wholly effin' #$&%*!!!

Woke up this morning in so much pain I could barely get out of my bed and hobble to the sofa! Now I am stuck here with my heating pad and can't move much still.

This after a morning just a couple of days ago where I felt almost normal upon waking.

This pain and my recent scan results leave me really thinking in swear words.

MRI results: compression fracture in one of my lumbar vertebrae and nerve impingement.

This is just from the briefing over the phone by the nurse. I will get more detail from the doctor on Thursday. (No, I didn't think to ask her to pop the results in the mail to me while I had her on the phone.) She also said the PET/CT showed no new cancer sites to the bone and no organ involvement, but some edema around the spine, which I have no idea about.

These are good results, right? Well I am pissed with them! I am in a serious amount of pain that does not stop at the lumbar area and this briefing of results does not explain all the pain.

Mostly I am pissed that I have a fracture, a skeletal event, which I have said all along was the thing I really wanted to avoid - breaks and fractures!  I'm not even sure anything can be done to facilitate healing in this case. WebMD said compression fractures generally heal, unless there is cancer involved. And the nerve thing...this is flashback to the pain of 08/09, before the METS, that lasted almost a year and through which I worked and suffered until I was worn nearly completely down.

I am barely getting around my house, in and out of bed, to the couch and to the bathroom!

I am sick of side effects. Sick of feeling like crap as a side effect of treatment and now this - pain not directly caused by the cancer, bones that may have been weakened by two years of anti- hormonal medications to combat the cancer. I've only been on a Zometa break for barely four months; Zometa, which was supposed to shore up my bones against "skeletal events", and which supposedly stays in your system for YEARS !  How could it fail me so soon? If one person mentions that weight can be a factor, weight that has increased as a freaking side-effect of AIs, I will scream, throw something, and possibly not speak to that person again.

So much pain. So debilitating.  I can't even sit upright for more than five minutes, and every oncologist visit is at least 3 hrs, all said. I don't know how I am going to do that on Thursday.

Damn it! I need to pee again. Struggle up off the sofa and into the bathroom. Pain flaring higher just thinking about it.

The doctor had better have a next-level pain med in his arsenal.

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