Tuesday, October 30, 2007
CANCER JOURNAL
One of the biggest problems with cancer is that no matter what hurts...no matter how typical of your age or your activities the pain might be...it is always cancer recurring. The mind gets fixated there.
Another big problem is the side effects of the medication. I'm on Femara, an estrogen suppressant that is used to treat estrogen-loving cancer. I've just been in a side-effects website to try to determine whether the problems I'm having are cancer or drug related. It appears that I can blame the drug.
My arms go to sleep and produce the numbness and tingling that normal people get when they keep a body part in one position too long. Only it can go on for hours, and moving around doesn't help. It can start in the middle of the night and keep me awake for hours. Sometimes my arms also ache along with it. Sometimes it begins right after I get up in the morning like it did this morning.
What I'm finding is that trying to type with a numb and tingling hand can produce some rather unreadable results. This morning it was all I could do to get one post up.
The other side effect I'm dealing with is elevated blood pressure.
Reading through a message board of symptoms from these estrogen suppressing drugs is enough to make a patient consider taking a chance with the cancer!
