Up and down and up and down and...

I felt pretty good yesterday and went shopping in the afternoon looking for a down coat (for the winter that I know is coming but isn't here yet as it's in the 50's still) which I never found, but went to three stores and found some other things I "needed". Came home, had dinner, talked on the phone to a good friend (who had great news- her cancer, her 2nd recurrence, has been put back into remission again with her latest chemo!!), spent some time on the computer, forgot to pack Z. lunch (her first day back to school was today after winter break and I've forgotten the routine I guess- ends up she packed herself her own lunch this morning instead- good for her!), watched some tv with A. and went to bed late (probably close to 1am by the time I was actually in bed). My back was hurting by the time I went to bed but I thought that it would subside as I laid down and relaxed. I was wrong. About 4am I woke up from the pain in my back/hip and thigh. I took some tylenol (afraid to take ibuprofen in the middle of the night as without food it makes me throw up) and put a Lidoderm patch on. Thankfully within a half hour or so the pain lessened enough for me to sleep.

There were NO CONTRACTORS in my house today so I was able to sleep late (A. brings Z. to school in the morning) but when I got up I started hurting again and spent most of my first free day in a long, long time without anyone in the house (A. was out most of the afternoon) on the couch laying on a heating pad. Oh well. By the time I went to pick up Z. from school I was feeling just a dull ache so that was good. The contractor's are coming back tomorrow so hopefully tonight will be better, I need the sleep. It's weird how it goes up and down, some days barely any pain, other days it's pretty high up there on the 1 to 10 pain scale medical people like to make me use. I don't know if this makes sense or not in terms of the tumor.

So yesterday evening I got a ray of hope. I was looking online at the NCI (National Cancer Institute) website at clinical trials, just to see what was out there (not much that is useful for me at this point) and read something in the exclusions. Previously, everything I have seen written online and in books is that once endometrial cancer has recurred outside the pelvis that it is considered incurable (and mine is outside the pelvis in the para-aortic node). But the sentence in this exclusion (meaning one can't partake in that particular clinical trial if this is the case) said: "Patients who have isolated recurrences (vaginal, pelvic, or paraaortic) that are amenable to potentially curative treatment with radiation therapy or surgery." Potentially curative treatment?? with an isolated recurrence to the para-aortic area?? I showed it to A. and he said that he thought that was what my dr. meant in giving me the 50/50 odds, a 50/50 chance of cure. Maybe he's right, I was thinking he meant a 50/50 chance of surviving this, but the conversation was a bit rushed and disjointed so who knows. Anyway, made me feel a little better, and god knows I need some hope here. So, this is where I'm going to hang that hope for now.

My friend (the one I mentioned above) was asking me how I was handling all of this and I said I was feeling calm. Very different from the way I felt with my previous cancer diagnoses. I'm not sure why. I'm not sure if it's because I don't quite believe it yet, or because I've not had the definitive biopsy done yet, or because I haven't started treatment yet, or that I've accepted it or something else. But it's definitely different.