Good tidings of great joy...

Not long after my last blog entry was posted, was I visited by Nurse Janice. Dr. V. was out of the office for the Christmas holiday and another oncologist was on call, so it took a little longer for her to get some information confirmed before coming down to see me. 

Nurse Janice is kind, warm, and no-nonsense. I like that because she gets me the information but delivers it with compassion. She started by telling me that Lou had contacted her about my recent freakouts and how he was concerned about the way I was processing all of the information and physical sensations that came along with the issues that plagued me over the last couple of months. She said she completely understood that because of where we are in the timeline of this disease. She, nor most trained professionals, are prepared to deal with the reasons I am so weird. I digress. We are no longer traveling along a predictable path because once you graduate from the initial treatment of Revlimid, Dexamethasone, and Velcade, things start to go a bit bonkers. 

With that in mind, she told me that she got my bone marrow biopsy report back and needed to consult with the doctor on call that she was reading it correctly. He confirmed that she was reading it correctly and gave her the A-OK to deliver the results to me. That information was: there was no sign of Myelodysplasia (a blood disease) in my system and that, best of all, I was back in remission again. She thought that information would do me a world of good and it did. Well, it did for a minute, but we'll get to the part where things started to go afoul inside my brain.

We discussed the lingering sensations in my left foot and she chalked that up as my nerve endings trying to knit themselves into a state of repair. It had, however, been three weeks since that conversation came up with the radiation oncologist, so she felt it was appropriate to broach the subject again.

Now, the most recent development concerns the thing hanging off the bottom of my face. I'm talking about my numb chin and lip. You might be thinking about the salad that was attached to my bottom lip at dinner this evening, but that came as a result of the numb lip. The thing with the numb lip is that several times throughout the day, my lip not only feels numb, but it also feels like someone rubbed a ghost pepper on it. It is, in short, not good. Nurse Janice asked me about the different zones on my face and if I was experiencing numbness anywhere else. Nope, just my chin and lower lip. The cause of this may be due to a tumour located at the base of my skull / the top of my spine. Nurse Janice said she would try to find the earliest available appointment for a CT scan. As of right the moment, it doesn't appear that she has. Now, before you get worked up about a tumour, let me tell you, for as many of them as I've had, they are probably the easiest of the issues to remedy.

Presently (and this is where things are going foul in my brain) I am comforted by the news of my remission, but it is overshadowed by my nightly inability to sleep due to the sensations in my foot. Also problematic are the constant flu-like body and joint aches, general malaise, and fatigue. These constant reminders, which insist on being unresponsive to meds start to erode at whatever hope I have. I still have it, but a little relief and normalcy would be quite welcome and would do me a world of good.

So that's where we are with things. We take the good tidings of great joy and hope they are enough to balance out the not so good stuff that my brain makes.

I wish all of you, my dear readers, a much better 2021.