Effects on the Side

Another week, another handful of appointments/ailments/complaints/whatever. Let’s run it all down.

Radiation

I will undergo 8 radiation sessions on my left upper arm. The goal is to radiate the bone metastasis to combat the pain I feel in the arm. While it may kill or shrink the actual cancer in that spot, that is not the intended outcome or treatment goal. For me, radiation’s goal is to treat the pain. To radiate as a curative method it might look something like this:

The positive for me, and my specific case, is that this radiation worked for me last time to almost completely stop my pain in my neck and part of my hip. Side effects? Almost none other than on my neck I don’t grow hair at the edge of my neck beard- which I’m pretty okay with.

Not me.

Palliative Care

I had my first ever meeting with the Palliative care team this week. Palliative care is often confused with hospice care and to simply it- Palliative helps deal with side effects and can be used at anytime in conjunction with your treatments and hospice is more end of life care, generally around 6 months or less left in life. (This may be different for some but this is my general understanding).

So my meeting went well I guess, I don’t know what going well constitutes now but I guess it did. We discussed side effects, medicines and mental well being. As with everything medical we are continuously monitoring my physical and mental health and can adjust things as needed. At this time we are only altering pain medication from morning and evening doses of morphine to a wearable Fentanyl patch that administers pain medicine over the course of three days. This change is to better manage and control pain as I am still relying heavily on Dilaudid to manage breakthrough pain.

Side Effects

As I was told the side effects would be worse on these new meds and they are starting up again. What are they?

• Pain. It’s the big one. My left arm, the one to be radiated, has pain radiating down it past my elbow. My back and hips hurt randomly as well- there’s metastasis and a herniated disc so it makes sense.

• Mouth. Mouth sensitivity is bad. Salt, acid and heat are intolerable. Toothpaste burns like fire. A regular Dorito is spicy now.

• Bathroom. Diarrhea or constipation? Take your pick it’s a toss up.

• Heartburn. Everyday. I get it without the fun of eating like crap- what kind of trade off is that?

• Feet. My feet are sore again. One of my last med combos gave me very sensitive and sore feet. I’m hoping it’s lesser on this regimen but we shall see.

• Sleep. Or lack thereof. I have been getting very little to no sleep many nights. I don’t know if it’s pain, discomfort, mental stress or what but what was once an easy to accomplish thing for me is now proving to be more difficult.

• Mental. The anxiety, depression, fear and more never really go away and they don’t tend to change for me with medicine changes. So you know, my mental illnesses have job security at least.

That’s it for now.

-Joe