Going back to school was beyond gratifying for me. During chemo your brain begins to become clouded. Thinking straight is almost impossible and words just slip your mind the second before you are about to say them, making you feel more than stupid. But as many studies have shown us if you don’t want to lose it you have to use it. This is what school did for me. In true Megan fashion I jumped all in. I took as many classes as possible each semester to get my nursing pre reqs done as fast as allowed and got myself on the nursing waiting list. School was actually going great. I found myself with good teachers which gave me the foundation to actually understand the content. I finished my pre reqs and my Associates of Science with straight A’s. Intellectually I felt a gratification that I had not felt in a long time, but all along my health was still a struggle for me. The hormone treatment made my patient less than thin (which is out of character for me) I felt tired all the time, I was experiencing muscle fatigue which no one could explain and my joints began to ache more than they ever had before. (this begs a side note) I have been fighting unexplained chronic pain my whole adult life. It started with some strange pain in my sternum when I was twenty and within a year or two had progressed to full body pain and fatigue. I was told by my normal doc that it was probably Fibromyalgia. I was told by a rheumatologist that it definitely wasn’t but my blood work also didn’t show any signs of arthritis so perhaps we should try to treat it like fibro. To no avail. I never found relief. I spent years giving up on doctors and then my pain would get worse so I would return dreaming that one might have a new trick up their sleeve. Still to no avail. My husband and I were married in Oct of 2005 and then in 2007 we planned and got pregnant. Maybe three months in I started to get abdominal pain. It was first thought to be the ligiments that cradle the uterus. But it continued to get worse. The pain increased to the point that I couldn’t always get out of bed on my own. And while on a camping trip to California to hike the red woods I awoke one night with a fever and a pain in my abdomen so bad I felt like something burst. The next morning we headed back to Utah to check into the ER who wouldn’t take me because I was 23 week pregnant and found myself being checked in to the labor and delivery floor. The decision was to remove my appendix. But when they got in there and the problem was not my appendix they look around with a scope and found massive inflammation on the outside of my bowels adhering them to each other. Four different Doctors were brought in to look at it all of whom had never seen anything like it. They opened me up, shaved down the inflammation and closed me up again. Ten day in the hospital on the labor and delivery floor (because I was 23 weeks pregnant) with nurses that didn’t know how to control the pain of this kind of a Patient. It took ten day for my gut to wake up. Then when I went home I found myself unable to eat virtually anything without experiencing massive pain. I lived on Ensure for three months of my pregnancy just so my sweet baby could get the nutrients she needed. We got high risk pregnancy docs involved as well as a GI doc. And even though my symptoms didn’t fit well he tested my blood for markers of Crohn’s disease. The test result came back 98% positive that I had Crohn’s. Well that explained the stomach pain, but not the rest of my pain. Makena was born in November and despite such a ruff pregnancy she did everything right. She was beautiful and healthy. I breast fed exclusively in the beginning but I began to struggle to keep up. I couldn’t make enough milk. So I breast fed as much as possible and supplemented w/ formula. At eight months when I returned to work we gave up the breast feeding all together. In Late august of 2008 I was lying in bed when I found the first breast cancer which brings us full circle to where this side note ends. As I found school harder and harder to manage I got palliative care doc involved. She has truly been a God send. It is not like she had some miracle treatment to give me or answer to why I felt like shit, but she never gave up, and she never made me feel like it was in my head like some many other doctors. We did blood tests (which always looked normal), bone scans (to make sure it wasn’t the cancer coming back) and she sent me to every kind of specialist that could possibly have insight. Finally we went back to the rheumatologist that I had seen 9 years earlier and with the new info of my Crohn’s diagnosis was able to tell me that I have Chron’s related inflammatory arthritis. We are still trying to find the right medicine to help it but after ten years of feeling crazy it feels like perfection to have a Doctor finally justify the pain that so many others had chalked up to depression, or even drug seeking. Well all along I had still been seeing my oncologist. We were to a point of seeing him every 6 months and getting a Zometa infusion, which is actually and osteoporosis medication. Cancer docs use it to strengthen cancer patients bone to make it harder for cancer to grow in the bones. My first couple treatment caused pretty extreme bone pain but then as the med built up in my system I began to get used to it. Well last April when I had my standard appointment we drew the typical blood work which for us included tumor markers. The tumor Marker’s had been low up to this point. A day after the Zometa infusion I started to feel like I was getting sick. And then came the worst back ach of my life. My entire skeleton ached but my back felt like it couldn’t hold my weight. I couldn’t twist, bend, cough, without 10 over 10 pain. That Tuesday I found out that my tumor markers were higher than normal and that I was going to need to have a PET/CT scan. It was scheduled for April 19th, I had to be there at 7:30am. The test is long and my joint ached as I lay there, perfectly still. The room is cold, the machine makes strange noises and your mind races. When it was over I asked how long it would take to get the results. The tech said the radiologist would read the test that day but that it might take a couple of days to get the results from my oncologist. Later that day I looked on line on a website by my insurance company that keeps track of my medical records and the radiologist had already posted the report. I was terrified to read it.
