Let's start off with a quick recap. In the last four weeks I've been diagnosed with two cancers (local bladder and advanced prostate), and have subsequently had hormone therapy, surgery, radiation, the catheter from hell, not to mention test after test and every doctor wants a vial of blood to check something or other. Somehow I'm still surprised that this has left me fatigued, nauseous, and in pain. On the bright side, I've easily lost 8 pounds without even trying.
Today's test was a bone scan. It was poetic torture of a sort. To understand why, you first must know what I do for a living. I work in a machine vision company named Cognex and spent a significant portion of this year integrating a new 3D camera into our VisionPro software product. This camera produces high resolution 3D images of a part by shining a laser stripe across the part and then using a sensor set at an angle to the laser to triangulate the 3D positions where the laser is illuminating the part. To get a full 3D image, the part must be moved through the laser plane while the camera slowly builds up a 3D image slice by slice. While it is extremely accurate, the need to move the part and take individual slices takes considerable time relative to other technologies.
In a similar fashion, the bone scan involved building up a model of my bones by taking individual slices as I was moved under the sensor at an excruciatingly slow speed. I was told to breathe normally keep my fidgety body as still as possible while it took the image. We're talking 30 minutes during which I'm not supposed to move. That's a considerable amount of time to focus on how much one's ribs move up and down in normal breathing. Does that still count as laying still? Still there I was, a victim of the same relatively slow line scan imaging technology I work with for a living.
To add to the torture, before the scan I was injected with radioactive phosphorous and told to come back for the scan 3 hours later after it had a chance to absorb into my bones. The cancer in my back causes pain if I sit too long. So, figure an hour long car ride to the hospital, sitting in the waiting room, then a walk over to the local library to read and kill time while sitting, then back to the hospital cafeteria for a sit-down lunch, and more sitting back in the waiting room again. My back started complaining so I improvised by laying down across some chairs:
Once again fighting cancer isn't always an exciting action movie, but more like a montage of what would otherwise be dull and boring scenes waiting for the next appointment or test.
That's enough about back pain and medical tests. As I've committed to running a 5K on Thanksgiving day, after getting back home I forced myself out the door to do my first run in weeks. I had a disparate set of goals: Cover three miles, get acclimated to running in the cold, and get my heart rate up over 180 briefly. The run was a success on all counts even if dreadfully slow. My body simply does not respond well to time off from running, but should bounce back quickly if I get back out a couple times over the next week. I'll still be slow from being out of shape and having low blood counts from the radiation treatment (I now have medical proof of that), but should be able to take maximum advantage of whatever fitness I do have, which isn't something I was able to do today.
The other reason that got me out for a run was yesterday's meeting with the onco. He stressed that getting out of bed and off the couch improves my prognosis considerably. When I mentioned that ibuprofen helps with the pain but may be causing digestive issues (mostly due to collateral damage from the radiation, but the ibuprofen seems to make it worse), he said to add Prilosec and keep taking the ibuprofen if it helps me keep moving.
So while I'm still in pain, the general trend is that I'm able to do more and more for the same amount of pain. I'm almost back to where I was before all the treatments and surgery started. Better yet, my latest PSA number is half what it was a month ago. It all points to the cancer being slowly beat back even before chemotherapy begins. The onco wants to give me a couple more weeks off before starting that, so I should be feeling pretty good before the next round of torture, which should be starting sometime in the first week of December.
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