On to the Feet

The story is coming out pretty confusing. I don't know if it's the blog format, my medication or it's a just a really confusing story. But let's get into the problems with walking.

In the Spring of 2005, I had tumor start growing in my left groin and another on the bottom of my right foot. The one on my foot was about the size of a hard boiled egg cut down it's length and glued to the sole of my foot. It was a real pain in the ass to walk on. I tried different shoes, cutouts in the soles and even started using a cane.

The chemo treatments I had in the summer kept things under control but by winter 2006, walking anything other than short distances was a problem.

The hip had the same problems except the tumor had eaten into some of the bone and we had a real strength issue. I also had a real pain problem putting any weight and even just resting the hip joint, this peaked in August and September. This was causing problems working so it was time to take care of it.

We spoke with the doctor's and decided to remove the the right foot tumor first. This won't solve everything. We also need to look at repairing the left hip joint and returning to cacer treatment program.

For the foot, the surgery cuts off the tumor and then applies a gauze bandage and a vacuum pump, they let the wound heel without skin for 10 days and then come back and complete the job with a skin graft.

This added up to about 6 weeks of sitting around the hospital/home as my foot is healing. Currently, I have probably another 2 weeks before the right leg is up and running.

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Brain Surgery

Well, it's been a couple of weeks so I'll stop arguing that I didn't have brain surgery.

After the seizures returned, it looked like the old dead tissue had been slowly bleeding for about a year - doc was baffled by this one -. Bleeding causes swelling, swelling causes seizure. The doc goes back to the simple solution and everyone is happy. All we need is a good MRI and schedule a date for surgery, 4 August. I was still a little confused. I thought the tumor was long gone after a year and only scar tissue remained and I thought the tissue was very soft. Instead, I think we had liquid swelling and I was mis-reading the MRI - more work needed here on my part.

Prior to surgery, I had weakness in my left arm from the day of Seizures, that slowly improved each day. At first, I could barely touch my fingers together. 2 weeks after the day of seizures. I had brain surgery. T he surgeon expected some follow on weakness or paralaysis. After surgery, I noticicied no change only continual improvement for the next 2-3 weeks back to what I remember as normal coordination. Everyone seemed quite surprised that everything worked out so well. Hopefully, all I got was another scar and a few stories.

I'll try and fill the rest of it in.

March is spent balancing over drugging and the min the doc's will let me get through. Driving is off limits, so the the new standard is: is this too much medication to understand the other person . The overall body response is slow to these drugs so it took a couple of weeks to settle everything down. Most of these drugs are anti-seizure and anti-convolsents, the side effect is typically dizziness.

May and June end with good feelings about the old tumor( shrinking) and the possibillity of getting back onto a cancer trials study. I'll need to change the anti seizure meds to something newer but other than that everything looks good.

The doctor was very excited I was accepted to the trial, he and I believe future treatment will be in this form of treatment - more later.

But, a couple of days later I have another seizure, apparently, the 9 month old dead tumor still has a few trix up it's sleeve. Plus the medicine is pretty finicky at crashing if you come off it quick.

The next day Wednesday, is the day of seizures. I probably had 20 -30 seizures of my left hand or arm that day, after quite a few of them I would suffer paralaysis in that joint for some time. The seizures didn't make me pass out but they wouldn't go away, so we headed to the ER.

I leave the doctor's and head back to work thinking most of this looks good, the tumor looks gone to me except for some swelling and nothing new has popped up. I get to work sit down at my cube. I'm talking with a few workmates, when my left arm retracts uncommanded, I then go into convulsions. About this time, my co workers are getting worried about me having sezures. I'm loosing consciousness. It's only been about 15 seconds. My co workers are asking if it's my arm, I realize for the first this is a seizure and I black out.

The nuerosurgeon gives me some medication and says 2 weeks seizure free and things should be ok. About 1.5 weeks later, I had another full blown seizure and the next day I had a smaller seizure.

The doc's pull all the string's: No driving, extra sezure medication with associated dizziness.

This begins in March of 2006.