Saturday, August 4, 2012

Time Flies when it Crawls



Not sure if the title makes any sense to anyone right now. To be a little clearer, I could say that I feel like I have lost so much time, waiting for approvals, answers, recovery time, next treatment, results. I got caught up in everything, or lost in it all, forgetting about the importance of “living” the journey, not just anticipating the destination. Reminder to brain… Live while I live!

Goodness, I don’t know where to begin, it has been almost a month and a half since I have written here. I’ll start small … my self-portrait made a lot of progress for a couple weeks, but has been on the back burner since. J Although it is far enough along that I get the gist of what I want to feel when I see it. I will get back to it soon.

Also, not sure I even brought it up before, but I am moving in with a roommate. My friend here in the apartments where I live, that has my fuzzy friend and with whom I attend my new church is going to be my roommate. I made her promise to tell me at any itme if she bit off more than she can chew (me) J.  We move into the new apartment in a couple weeks. So I suppose much of my time, I have been trying to clean up this apartment and pack what few things I have kept around. Fortunately I cleared out my material things a few years ago.

The results of the tissue testing from chemo did not turn out too great. Basically the only chemotherapies that may work are the “harsh” ones, with lifetime limits or potential difficult side effects, so for now I am staying with hormonal type treatments (not hormones), anti hormonal in a way. I should have another scan session the end of the month and know if they are working at all or at least stabilizing the bone mets. I found myself thinking, “why wasn’t this tissue testing done before, I probably wasted a year and much pain with chemos that had little hope of helping” but looking back doesn’t help the future. These tests are not done right away because of their costs, although compared to the costs of the chemos that didn’t work, it would have been small potatoes. So ????

On the liver front (yep it’s a war in many ways). I had the initial “mapping”, which was fairly tolerable with some pain accessing and closing the artery in the groin. The actual procedures (left and right lobes separately) were approved and I had the right lobe treated almost 4 weeks ago, with the left scheduled for the 8th of August. Briefly the first procedure had a glitch… my body had created a new branch off the liver artery that went to my intestines?? Sine the mapping 3 weeks prior and since it was late in the day, the procedure could not be completed that day and I had to return the next. First the pain was excruciating compared to that of the mapping. The Dr thought it was because I had developed scar tissue in the groin where the artery had been accessed before (during the mapping). So the actual day of the procedure, they used the left leg artery instead and the pain was much less. The first few weeks weren’t bad, I didn’t have the usual side effects of anorexia (don’t think my mind can comprehend that) J. Although after two weeks I had some difficult issues a day long of vomiting followed by intense pains (probably from all the vomiting) then I could not eat much without discomfort. Sooooo, now my Dr. says I am atypical (no kidding – I try to tell all my Drs that up front). Anyway he believes I may have developed an ulcer, as some of the radiation can “ooze”? in to adjoining organs. Not huge amounts of radiation, as the mapping procedure assured that. But I suppose it doesn’t take much these days to throw my body out of whack. Anyway, I go in Monday to have blood work and a CT to assure all is ok for Wednesday’s procedure.  I can tell you that medicine is not black and white, by far; There isn’t any sure-fire med for anything or anyone.

This whole experience has given me new insight into the “pain meter” (gauging your pain from 1 to 10). Thank God, literally, that we cannot relive physical pain the way we can relive emotional pain. I realized that I can compare the levels of pain, not by recall of the actual pain, but what I prayed for while enduring it. I won’t share the specific prayers.  But think about your own pain experiences… It isn’t just childbirth that you cannot recall the pain (because of the miraculous birth of a baby) but all pain, we can not relive it, only what we were thinking or what our bodies were doing while we were in pain. Thank you God, for that enormous blessing.