6.25.2007

Holy Cow!

Until this morning, I've managed well enough with annoying discomforts that can be endured for the purpose of shrinking the ugly cancer in my lungs. This morning I managed to get up, feed the kids, make some lunches for the two who had no school lunch today and send everybody off to their respective schools. A half an hour later I started to get an ache in my chest which I felt could be from coughing all week. I noticed one of the girls had forgotten to take her packed lunch so I set off on the bicycle to deliver it to her school. By the time I got to the school I was wondering if I was having a heart attack the pains became so severe and spread all over my left side and around to my back (but not the arm). I didn't feel up to climbing to the fourth floor to find out which daughter forgot her lunch and lucked out when a teacher headed that way offered to take it to the teachers' room to have the homeroom teacher deliver it for me. A quick guess at which daughter might be lunchless and some thank yous later, I was wobbling back home on my bike, the pain increasing.

I decided to lie down for a while to see if the pain would subside and it did, after a little less than an hour. I slept all day and went off to teach my Monday afternoon classes and will definitely ask my oncologist about this at tomorrow's visit.

This is the first "pain" and not just discomfort I've had in this cancer experience and because I've always thought that I had a fairly high threshold for pain, it worried me that I had any pain at all. There could be a number of reasons for it from listed Taxol side effects (I'd have thought that this type of pain would be closer to the time of infusion and not 6 days later though) to panic attacks, tired muscles from coughing all week, pleurisy, viruses or heart attacks. It'll probably be something like a bra that was fastened too tightly (Where did I put that bra extender?).

Seems like I'll never run out of things to talk about with my oncologist. I'm glad things have calmed down at any rate, whew! The good news, I got the right daughter and she was grateful for the delivery.

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