Vertebral Vertigo

I think my family doctor has rather high expectations for physical therapy.   He thinks I won't need muscle relaxants. 

There have been beneficial effects although the therapy hurts a bit sometimes.

During the session a couple of days ago I asked my PT guy what he was doing and he said he was pressing on ribs (just below the shoulder) to move the vertebra.  He also pressed areas of my neck rather painfully (I'm not one to complain) to move those vertebra.
 
He also applied some traction with a towel wrapped around my head to stretch out my neck.

This is in addition to some things he did with my head that I can't describe very well.

My neck cracks in the oddest way when I lean it over to the left and then right side. My PT guy said I don't have to worry about that.  I have a lot more mobility now and my neck feels more relaxed.

I've had some improvement, but I have good days and bad days.

If I sleep late (like today) my neck feels much better.

Stress (like meetings) cause pain.   I wonder if working itself is the problem?

Adventures in Neurology: Tendentious Spinal Tendinitis

I had a neurological exam a couple of days ago with a young and attractive neurologist.   A pleasant break from all the male doctors and therapists I've been seen by recently. 

I always prefer to disrobe for ladies.

Naturally a neurological exam entails a certain little metal hammer with a rubber stopper on both ends of the head and my first thought was 'lead hammer treatment' which is I know spurious and pointless, but it came to me nevertheless.

Hammer just below the knee, some places on the arm and this attractive young woman kept hammering her thumb nail when she was doing part of my arm.  She said it was so she could feel the tendon, but it looked like it hurt.  And yes I asked her about that.

I saw my MRI and and it looked as though my spinal cord was being squished inside of my spinal canal.  But it would be inadvisable to try surgery  because that could make it worse.

I don't have any of the more serious symptoms such as tingling or numbness in my arms or legs; weakness in my legs.   Inability to do fine finger coordination (as in typing).   And many others.

I just have headache and a stiff neck.  I've noticed that my neck cracks a lot. 

Therapy: stretches, physical therapy, maybe a little yoga.  I also have prescriptions of muscle relaxants to soothe the knotted muscles.

Neck Stretch Manifesto

Oddly enough I discovered something about my neck condition on Monday and which is that high pressure meetings give me a headache.  My project has to be done by the end of This Week and I got a couple of people to finish it with me.  Plus the Systems Analyst showed up for the meeting and my boss was on the phone.   Isn't there a ROCK SONG from the 80's called PRESSURE?

Well the headache and tension lasted into today and when I got to Physical Therapy I mentioned that I had discovered something that causes my headaches to get worse and the PT guy said something to the effect:  that's great - now you can avoid that.

Yep.  Try to avoid that.

Well there were some more exercises and my PT guy did some things were he held my head and had my try to turn it or move it in certain ways.

He also wrapped a towel around my head and pulled it up and back.  Which helped with the part of my back just below the neck that felt knotted up.


So on my way home I was able to turn my neck much more easily and I have much more flexibility.

I still have headaches, but I bet if I could get rid of the meetings they might get better.

The Neck: Such a Tender Little Thing

It is too early to tell if I've made a great deal of progress in the physical therapy.  Although I have had interesting conversations with the therapist.   He's from California and lived a long time in the Bay Area and we share an interest in Asia.    He spent some time at a university in Japan.

Although I now enjoy the pleasure of mild to moderate headache daily, compared to the pain and anguish caused by my neck tumor, it's not much.

The therapist did some tests to check outside the spine at what seemed to be pressure points to see if when he pressed hard there was some pain other than muscle pain and there was not.  Which I guess means that this is a mild case of whatever it is.

Moderate pain is always better than severe pain.

I inquired about the neck stretching contraption my doctor had been describing and he said he thought I wouldn't need that.  Just exercises.

There are muscles that are commonly weak on most bodies that my therapist has given me exercises to strengthen.   There are also exercises that stretch neck muscles and I believe pull the vertebra apart on one side when they pull them together on the other side.

Another bit of advice is to do the exercises when I feel a headache getting worse - and that was useful advice.

My therapist pointed out when we were talking about the stenosis, that it extended beyond the cervical area of the spine to the thoracic area just below.

I could feel headaches getting worse with the R-CHOP infusions, but the severe pain didn't start until the revlimid.  So I guess the damage is done and I will have to recover, probably slowly.

This condition leads not just to headache but cramps in some of my neck muscles and the muscle above my collar bone on the right side.

One thinks of cancer, then the cure but not the side effects from either the cancer or the drugs taken to rid ourselves of it.   It is as though the shadow of the disease lives with me still.

If I exert myself for several hours I still feel weak.   But I guess if the cancer therapies kill fast growing cells, they do something to the regular cells.

I wonder what it is?

Happy New Year! A little New Year/Old Year Retrospective:

One year ago yesterday I had my first R-CHOP infusion and I cannot tell you what fun that was.  I think I pissed off the head nurse.  Either that or she liked me.   It is very hard to tell.

We arrived in the waiting room of the infusion center and a hospital identification band with my name and number was clipped around my left wrist.   We took a seat on a couch and I looked around at the other patients.  One that caught my eye was a very young woman who looked in her teen years.  She had long blond hair and was dressed in comfortable looking gray sweats.  She was with her parents.   

I was haunted by the thought of someone so innocent and attractive having to endure what she was about to go through.

Of course I have no idea what regimen she was going to be on but I thought she was awfully young to have to face the consequences of this kind of therapy.  But I suppose cancer drives us to embrace horrid therapies.

In due time my oncologist showed up with an envelope of prescriptions and the pathology report from the PET scan which showed that I had many more tumors than the one that gave me headaches.

Altogether Mary and I counted six tumors and as Mary looked though the document she noted where the tumors weren't.  They seemed to have missed the places that would be difficult to treat.

But I had one in my liver and one in my spleen which might explain some of the days that I had felt very bad.

My oncologist also explained the drugs that I would be taking each day for up to the first five days.  Chief among these was a heavy duty steroid prednisone, a choice of drugs to relieve the nausea (one was zofran and the other compazine) and a big orange pill which was I believe allopurinol which is used to treat gout.  This last drug was to counteract the problem of the tumor cells breaking down and putting all kinds of things that should be inside of cells into my bloodstream.

I think we were some of his first patients because he only gave me 5 days worth of prednisone and limited quantity of zofran because it was expensive.   We ended up having a little talk about how he was increasing our costs because of how he was prescribing his drugs.   My oncologist had been a researcher in Seattle before coming to Chapel Hill and I do not believe that he had spent a great deal of time with human subjects.   Patients.

He is Asian, and I believe hit it off with my wife better than me.  Although he tolerated my rambling.   Mary and I both liked him immediately.

We were called into the infusion center and I was shown to a very comfortable reclining chair.   Mary had to make do with something merely functional.

The ubiquitous question when you are in a cancer hospital and they are about to take blood or infuse you is: "Do you have a port?"

That is because at least one of the drugs is essentially caustic and the other drugs are not good for your veins.

They put the needle into a vein near the surface so they could tell it was in the vein and let it drip saline for a while.   The nurse explained the nature of the drugs - if they put it in higher near the elbow and missed the vein the joint at the elbow might need replacement.

It gives new meaning to the words "dangerous drug".

Since I had a port for the following infusions I can tell you that it is indeed better.  But it still hurts when they put the needle in.

The head nurse explained that they would titrate the first drug because some people have a bad reaction to it.   They explained that they did this for patients initially so that they didn't kill them.  Or some such words.

It could be a fatal reaction.

So we waited, and waited and it dripped and dripped and I had absolutely no reaction.  They kept asking if I was cold and if my heart was causing me to rock side to side and I always said no.

What I did notice within a couple of hours of this was that the headache was going away and my neck was feeling better.   A little part of me was thinking that all they needed to give me was that one drug and the cancer would go away.

We left the cancer hospital late and because it was new years eve we had to venture into the parking structure which is up a long ramp and some distance away.   The side effects of the drugs hadn't hit me yet.   As we walked out of the hospital one of the nurses who had stayed late to handle my case turned to us and said good night and Happy New Year. 

Mary and I stopped off at Burger King that evening after visiting the drug store to get my batch of prescriptions filled.   I was destined to sleep in our "Venus fly trap chair" a big stuffed leather chair and ottoman that is very comfortable and I would sweat up my T-shirt and shorts that night. 

I developed cancer sometime about my 60th birthday and it wasn't treated for six months. It gave new meaning to the term "New Year" because although I would get up the next morning after an almost sleepless night feeling horrid I had a new lease on life.

Within a week the swelling on the inside back of my throat had gone down and I could sleep in a bed again.

And then it was just a matter of making it though the treatments.  Or so I thought, considering that the treatments themselves can be physically devastating.