CT Scans - The Bearers of Bad News - May

After my April CT scan I was FOCUSED! I had goals! And I had lots of plans to put into action. I was ready to reclaim my life, shake off the cabin fever, shake off the winter weight and get some energy back into my routine. I may actually have to put up some of my to-do lists just because I'm sure all the other type A'ers out there would get a big kick out of them!


The other good news was that I was getting tons of hours in at Smoky Row and Ryder & I were going running on an almost nightly basis. So much so that my customers were starting to come in and say "hey you're the girl that's always running down town with the black dog", yep that's me! And in between these busy activities I was still commuting up to the cities to spend time with my "Spring Fling".


I finally felt like I had gotten some things under control and was starting to build up a routine again. There was a lot more going on but I mean, come on, I have to have some sort of boundary between my personal life and my blog life :) And if it weren't for that pesky internal organ pain, things would have been fine. I mean it wasn't like I had all of life's questions answered but I was in a good spot and heading in an even better direction.


BUT my body hurt. I had pain in the trunk of my body and on both sides. The pain wasn't really specific to one side or the other, but seemed to switch back and forth. And sometimes it just hurt right under my belly button. There was always a dull pain, mixed with some very sharp shooting pains. They were kinda like toppings on a sunday... but not really tasty or exciting. They were so sharp that the pain would take my breath away and I'd have to hold on to something to steady myself and breathe through it, definitely intense to say the least. But I'm so thankful to my yoga practice for teaching me to breathe!


And to give you an idea, here are just some of the things we thought it might be but ruled out because they didn't seem plausible:
* gas pain... CA - "Are you sure you don't have to fart?" AOD "well yea I have to fart but farting doesn't usually hurt for like 2 weeks" CA - "True... are you should you don't just have to fart a lot?" AOD rolled her eyes...

* menstrual cramps... although I had just had my yearly physical and everything checked out fine down there (maybe this should have been one of those boundary things that I should have left out... tbd based on feedback received)

* ovulation pain... that usually doesn't hurt on the side of your stomach ...unless I missed that week of human biology

* pain from working out... easy enough to rule that out... I was more than happy to stop running

* pain from surgery last July... nerves just reconnecting..such a reach... i mean that was almost a year ago


There were quite a few more but this just gives you somewhat of an idea again of the randomness of the pain. And even though we racked our brains and other family members' we still weren't able to uncover any correlations between the pain and any sort of activity or anything else.


So finally on Friday I broke down and made the call to Dr. Bryce (DRB) to get his opinion. The call kinda went kinda like this:

AOD - Described the pain and ran through the lists of possibilities that we thought it might be and then some of the reasons why it couldn't be any of the reasons we had come up with

DRB - Gave me the speech about how once we have cancer it's hard not to think that every future bump, scrap or bruise isn't cancer again, etc., etc., etc...

AOD - Told him that I had kept these thoughts to my self for 2 weeks just in case I was, for some crazy reason, making it up in my head, shared it with my mom and we'd been monitoring it for 2-3 weeks. I also added that it definitely wasn't getting any any better and if anything it's getting worse.

DRB - Again he really didn't expect to find anything.

AOD - Told him it was starting to interfere with my daily activities and that sometimes the pain was so bad I didn't even want to have sex! (oh and you better believe I emphasized that)

DRB - He said that if it was alright with me we would set up a scan that next Tuesday.

Why is it that the sex thing always seals the deal (punned on purpose) for people believing me... Plus my feeling is that he knows how much I detest getting scanned so for me to be requesting one, something was up...