I seem to have acquired a permanent companion. I'm loathe to call it pain, rather it's discomfort at worst and just a nagging presence at best. Occasionally it's a sharp prod but not very often.
Now the worst thing at the moment is the not knowing. Is my new companion simply my imagination? Might it be nothing more than the normal aches and pains of the aging process? How about just being unlucky enough to have become arthritic and coincidentally just in the area where I was told the cancer was detected by the bone X-Ray?
Logic would say no.
Part reasoning and part enquiry has to led to some better understanding of the medical thinking behind not putting me back in the machine that goes 'ping' (a Monty Python's Meaning of life reference in case you don't already know).
So, some months back Charlie was found to have spread his tentacles to three spots or places (I have no idea of the size nor where exactly - I wasn't told and I didn't ask) in my pelvis and a lymph node. From my understanding, cancer reacts and grows differently according to type. Much of how rapidly it grows depends on the type of cancer and to some degree upon the host. Genetics plays a part and is why the government recently announced that they are going to ask volunteers to donate DNA for individual genomes to be mapped. The idea is that where aggressive cancers are slow to spread, there may be something in that particular genome that could point towards possible benefits for those less genetically fortunate.
Following along those lines, no-one has any real idea how long Charlie has been burrowing his way into my bones. He could be any age. Depending on my particular genetic make up, he could have been a couple of years old when first spotted or only a few weeks old. Finding three locations where he's set up home doesn't give any indication of how malignant or how benign he his. Well not until someone has another peep at him to see if he's spreading out into the neighbourhood. The time for taking another butcher's is considered best left until the first anniversary of his discovery and that should provide a measure of his voracity or hopefully his torpor. That's why the consultant didn't offer any treatment beyond the current hormone suppressant. No-one knows how fast or how slowly Charlie is doing his thing, if he's doing anything at all.
Which brings me back to the beginning of this entry. For a month or so my new companion has been fairly consistently present. I think I've reported before that the best description is like having had a needle left in my hip. There's a centre of the discomfort and a dull ache radiating outwards from it.
This is accompanied by an ache spreading down my left femur. Sometimes it's near the hip, at others it reaches down to my knee.
Of course there's the possibility that it's something unrelated and I'm just being a big girl's blouse. Quite why I seem to need twelve hours sleep in every twenty-four hours could just be an instinct to hibernate at this time of year and my (some think, irrational) hatred for the Christmas binge but that would be more understandable if the sleep was an unbroken period instead of the four or at best five hours I seem to manage.
I cannot rule out that I'm just being a big jessie and it's really all in my head. Who knows? Once the "festivities" have been and gone, I might perk-up a bit.
