Pain Management Merry-Go-Round

(WARNING: TMI alert for this post!)

Thanks to all of you that sent notes, calls, and well-wishes this week. Sorry I haven't been able to get back to you and thank you properly, as I've been caught up in a pain cycle I wish I could get out of.

I have a couple of good hours a day (like right now), and then my bone pain starts up again. I have a variety of escalating remedies I can take for it, but I always end up (unfortunately) with vicodin. Even with that I am still sometimes crazy with pain at night.

The vicodin makes me really constipated...and the bone metastases also make me really constipated, since they dissolve bone material into my bloodstream. Together, both processes make me painfully constipated, which just adds to the cycle.

Two days ago I felt good enough to take a long walk...but I started feeling a dull ache near my perineum, and have had blood in my urine ever since. I have a call in to the doctor to see if there's any immediate action I should take. (I hate wasting the perfectly good blood transfusion that I got just last Saturday!)

Once I'm able to decrease the pain, I'll be able to evaluate whether this dear old body will be stable enough to move into an apartment on my own. For the past few days I haven't been very sure about this.