Whew!

After a long couple days of waiting I got my ct test results and the cancer continues to be stable. Needless to say, a huge relief! I see the med onc next week and the gyn onc the week after so we'll see what they have to say, but I suspect not much (at least about that).

I took my 8 steroid and 2 benadryl pills the night before and luckily the benadryl won out and I slept through the night. The next day I was told not to take the next set till I got to the scan place. Normally it takes an hour after you drink the barium before you get the scan, but because I had to wait to take the pills and they needed 2 hours to work I had to sit in the waiting room a long time. The scan went fine, but then I had to sit outside the scan room in the hallway where they could watch me for a half an hour to be sure I didn't have a reaction. I was fine but my iv was still in my hand (my arm veins were practically non-existent that day) and must have gotten moved and I had a little bloody mess on my hands (haha) so they just took it out (they like to keep it in for emergency drugs, when I had the allergic reaction last time one of the first things they did was put an iv in). Thankfully A. had driven me (and was so patient sitting in the waiting room for almost 3 1/2 hours) as I was exhausted by the time we left. Later that night my face and chest were flushed and hot, but I just decided to go to bed early and was fine the next day. I don't know if it was a "reaction" to the dye or not, but I'll let the med onc know about it when I see him next week.

Meanwhile the rest of my health needs dealing with. My back pain continues and acupuncture is not working anymore (in fact my last treatment made things worse so I have stopped for now). I started seeing an osteopath for mild manipulations which seemed to be helping initially, but doesn't seem to be helping much anymore. So about a month ago I increased my pain medication and that seems to be helping the most. Only problem is the pain medication (ibuprofen) is making other things worse, like my blood pressure and now my liver function tests are elevated. Last week before the liver function test results, my internist had me try using one ibuprofen with one EX tylenol instead of 2 ibuprofen (4x/day) to see if that might help with my blood pressure. First, we needed to see whether it helped with the pain, and so far it's not bad. Maybe not quite as good as just ibuprofen, but not too bad. Only problem is tylenol is even worse on the liver. I'm still taking it but need to see whether he wants me to continue or go back to straight ibuprofen. Sigh... I'm trying to avoid narcotics or anything that will cause cognitive issues, but it's getting harder and harder to do. Meanwhile I've upped my daily dose of milk thistle (an herb which helps the liver deal with crap that I used to take during chemo, but had been only taking a low dose of since then) to see if that might help. I'm supposed to get retested in a few weeks and we'll see where we are then. Also we'll see if my bp goes down, if not then it will be time to start bp meds too. I hate all this medication stuff, everything has a side effect and interacts with something else and I feel like I'm juggling and can't keep all the balls up in the air. But it's all necessary, I absolutely can not live without pain medication at this point, so we'll have to figure out something.

And I suppose we will figure something out, and then things will change and we'll figure something else out. Just part of getting older, especially when there are multiple health problems. At least I have the wherewithal to research my options and be an active participant in the decision making process (or does that actually make it harder? maybe in a way it's easier to just do what a dr. tells me to do, but that will never be my style). And as much as I hate going through these scans every 3 months I know that so many others are going through the same thing and there is some strength gotten from knowing I am not alone.