Kinda Good, Kinda Bad

My days are now just tolerable. I had a wonderful day on Sunday, but since then I’ve lived with various degrees of back pain. Hopefully I’ll know more after tomorrow.

Monday morning I had my PET scan. They gave me drugs to reduce my reaction to claustrophobia of the tiny little space in which I was to reside for over an hour. But we had trouble getting an IV started. As the nurse inserted the needle, I would take a deep breath (which is like holding my breath) and she said that it made my veins open and close like crazy……Not good for trying to start an IV. They finally ended up pricking my finger – needed to test my blood to see if they could give me the pills for relaxation. After about 45 minutes, I had relaxed enough that they got the IV started….no problem. Of course by this time they had called in another nurse! I’m such a problem. This entire procedure took over three hours, but I was safely back home by 1pm.

Upon arriving at home, I promptly laid down for a nap….sleeping until almost 4pm. Then I realized that I had been fasting since the previous evening and still hadn’t eaten anything. So I rounded up some food and started feeling better. The back was bothering me the last 15 minutes of the scan, but tolerable. Took some drugs on the way home.

Tuesday night (last night) I had an MRI at 5:45pm. Usually they last about 30 minutes, but the doctor had ordered two separate areas to image, and I was in the machine for over 1½ hours. I got to listen to music this time, which helped pass the time. But we did a lot of the tests with me holding my breath. I think the longest time was 25 seconds, but I was getting pretty tired of it before it was over. Again, hard on my back towards the end. That’s a long time to have to lie still.

Today has been one of those “pain pills every 3-hour days” and nothing seems to help.

Tomorrow morning I have Physical Therapy early, then a follow-up appointment with Mitra to go over the results of these last two tests. I’m praying that we finally get some answers and can move forward.

Will let you know what the doc has to say.