Nausea. It is a relatively small word apparently. It means a lot to me though considering I go through waves of nausea all day everyday. Apparently I am not suppose to be having nausea. Has modern medicine not advanced far enough to understand that if a patient is nauseas that there is a reason for it. The answer is apparently No, it has not. And frankly it makes nauseas. Ha! Makes me think of the movie "The Doctor" with William Hurt 1991. I'm going to leave that there and for those who have seen it will understand that I am not wishing cancer on anyone, just the ability to understand what it is like to be a patient at the mercy of doctors. In particularly Doctors who have all the answers. I am glad that doctors have all the answers when we are discussing an extremely rare cancer. About 800 new patients each year and of those an extremely few amount have a primary tumor in the lung. I guess there have been so many few cases to go off of so maybe we just make it up as we go along and we tell the cancer that it may not be nauseas until we figure out if it can cause nausea or not. Good thing cancer listens to the experts becuase it doesn't listen to the patients who are hosting it and if it didn't listen to the Doctors cancer maybe considered as dangerous or life threatening.
While on this note. Let's discuss pain too. Why not just lay it all out there on the table and maybe another person with pain or nauseas may run across this and atleast say hey, my doctor is an expert at neausea and non-existent pain too!
While staying in the hospital (aug 9th - 18th 2007) I had went into the hospital with excrciating chest pain that went down into the mid stomach area. It also went up into my chest, around the heart. They couldn't find any reason for this and thought it could have been due to the severe reflux disease (in the chest) and in the stomach due to the blood backing up into my stomach thought caused by the numerous amounts of cysts that I have. I wasn't hurting constantly, although in th ebeginning I was hurting alot more consistently and frequently. We upped the nexxium and over time it seemed to get less and less. The pain in the stomach definitely comes and goes in cycles, probably around the cycles of my menstruating. I have frequently had a pain that would come on quickly and leave just as quickly in my head left front side and up over the top and sometimes beginning in the right lower back side of my head (where the head meets the neck.) I have had that pain for approx. 1 year now on and off.
The Biopsy
The biopsy went well and they checked afterward to make sure there were no problems after the procedure. Within a couple of hours after the biopsy I had pain in my lower left lung. I did not know it was the lower left lung. I just knew where I felt th epain and the Doctors in the hospital thought it could be from where they went straight through a muscle around my shoulder blad and down into the lung with the needle. They told me that they had seen that before and that it does go away over time that the injured muscle contracts tightly thus causing the pain. I don't know as I am not a doctor but it sounded reasonable to me! In the hospital they were giving me a low dose of morphine by putting it in my IV. When it was time to go home, I still had the pain...it was consisently worsening in the evenings and so that is th eonly time I was needing any pain medication for it.
Since I would be going home my husband asked what we would do about the pain that would come on...the hospitalist prescribed mepregan for this. After getting home the pain would come on in the evenings just the same and I was taking the mepregan. Sometimes I would have pain earlier now than the usual evenings so I would take mepregan twice a day. This wasn't really helping the pain. The mepregan didn't help the chest pain or the head pain at all. So I stopped taking it.
Now it was time to start throwing up profusely! I thought Oh! now here comes the real fun! Doctors have no idea why I am nauseas or throwing up. At this time I possibly had a bone tumor in my head. The one that I had, then didn't, then had, then didn't have it again. It just depended on what test they had just ran and what doctor I was talking to as to whether it existed or not. This was probably the most initial frustrating part of the whole ordeal to date. We have no idea what stage this cancer is in either. I am not even sure if I want to know. I think it means the same thing whether I know it or not. This is strange for me as I am the person who wants to know and have the answers for most things in life. If I don't know I look it up and read about it. It is hard to take it all in though when it is about you and it may not be the best of situations. So anyway, I began throwing up a lot. We were worried about me traveling that way considering it is even less fun to throw up for an entire car ride. So George got in touch with a PA that is a friend of ours and she wanted to see me before we went on our trip, she was planning on setting up the medication for the pain when I needed it as well as taking care of the nausea, this way I could travel to the experts without throwing up the entire flight and they would know more of what to do about these types of things for this type of cancer. She put me on 20 mg Kadian to take in the mornings and 5 mg oxycodone for breakthrough pain, when it came on in the evenings and she explained that I could take that in less amounts too, however much I needed up to a certain amount per day. Nausea, for this she prescribed zofran, 8 mg pills and I could do those the same way. A whole pill if it was really bad or I could break it up into quarters or halves, depending on how much I needed (apparently I can take up to 24 mgs of this a day.) Although I never took over 8 mgs and that was stretched out in quarters to half a pill at a time, which would be 2-4 mgs at a time up to 8 mgs a day is what I have been taking.
The Specialists in Chicago while voicing their concerns are that the oxycontin is probably causing the head pain, which he thinks just may be a headache broughton by the medicine. Even thought the head pain has been there on and off for over a year and I had just began the medicine the week before I was in his office, the same exact pain in the same place just more frequent now and with more intensity. Although it still isn't totally unbearable and it isn't usually extremely intolerable. It just hurts really bad, but usually briefly.While seeing him he changed it to oxycontin 5 mg for breakthrough and 10 mg oxcontin for regularly. Oh my gosh, can we say overkill. That medication actually causes me to have headaches a dull ache that just styas there as well as making me feel groggy. The whole point was low doses for when i really needed it and something that woudl still allow me to function at 100%. I think we have now totally missed the mark. As well as the doctor thinks I shouldn't be needing to take anything becuae I shouldn't be having any pain. I say of course I shouldn't need to take it the problem is that sometimes do need to take it!!
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