UGH! over a month and I just got around to posting an update.. Its been a long month, most of which I've been sedated. After my last post, I had been readmitted to the hospital for more random broken bones (this is one of the things my cancer does to me, my bones just break or fracture for no reason sometimes), so the doctors took that opportunity to cut me open and rip out a chunk of my rib that had a tumor on it so they could test it and find out what kind of cancer I have exactly.

The good news was they did get a final diagnosis, the bad news is the kind of cancer it is, plus of course the whole hell I went through to find out. but i'll get to that. The Cancer I have is called Multiple myeloma - that link is a bit technical, basically the way I understand it, the cancer beats down my bones causing them to be fragile and break on their own even when I haven't even done any heavy lifting or of the like. I can just take a shower, as in one of my last posts, and end up with a broken rib. And let me tell you about the bone pain, I got aches like an 80 year old, in my back, hip, neck, etc. thank god for the pain medication or I would go insane. Other wonderful side effects of the Cancer is the tumors that can spread to any other part of my body and cause more havoc, then there's the calcium break down in my bones doing a number on my kidneys putting me at risk for kidney failure. And of course my new predisposition to getting infections easily but not being able to fight them off. I'll later post a direct link to more detailed info on all of that once I find resources that say it in laymen's terms that I understand.

Ok so why haven't I posted in so long? I'm really sorry, but that operation to take out a chunk of rib really knocked me down, I barely started to recover from that, but just as I was being discharged from the hospital again, the incision got a nasty infection that no one noticed until 2 days home, I suddenly break out in fever and my chest cavity filled with fluids leaving me with less than 1/3 lung capacity. So another rush to the hospital, and they stick a tube in me to drain the fluid, in total 3 liters of it, and cut me open again to drain the infection. This time I'm on so much medication during the process, I'm pretty sure I slept through most of the last month. The increase in pain killers made life tolerable, but make me sleep allot, and when I am awake, the steroids to shrink my tumors are playing havoc on my emotions, I feel like I'm on a roller coaster, one minute I'm fine, the next minute I'm having the worse emotional breakdowns of my life, and all without a trigger or anything, just out of the blue.

If that wasn't enough, The doctors just happened to underestimate how much anesthesia I needed to stay down during the operation, and didn't give me any pain killers by the time the anesthesia wore off, so after being cut open and having a rib ripped out, I had the joy of waking up screaming in agony, feeling the entire results of the operation, while they scrambled to sedate me again and get some pain killers in me. OMG I just don't have the words in my vocabulary to describe that experience.

But now I'm home. not really, I'm at my Mom's house, while home is being re-located to greenwood, but God does it feel good to be out of that hospital after 2 months of hell. I've been through so much part of me doesn't even wanna go back for chemo in october, I'm so tempted to refuse treatment, I just had too much already. But I guess we'll see how I feel if I can just manage to stay out of a hospital for the next month and a half. So anyway, now that I'm on my feet again, I'm gonna have to start calling around to all the people I've lent money to in the past and hope they can find it in their hearts to help me out, even with all the gifts and help everyone in the family has helped out with, I'm still scraping at the bottom of the barrel with this move and all my debts. I'm even sure I'll have to fight tooth and nail to get my damage deposit back even though that house is in the same beat to hell shape it was in when I moved in, time will tell I guess.