Is this what cancer feels like? or….

just because you have cancer doesn’t mean you can’t have something else wrong with you!

I had been feeling kind of crappy all week, which I attributed to starting on Marinol, and having company from out of town all week. Vertigo, more pain, REALLY tired, just crappy. But, then again, I had a slight problem in a private area. I went to see my FP about it and was put on antibiotics and hot soaks on Friday. By Saturday I was barely functional, but the scary part was that I felt EXACTLY like I did when I went to the ER and was diagnosed a week later (by the way, diagnosis anniversary happened to be Saturday). Anyway, I didn’t know what was going on, could this be an abscess? Was it the new meds? Or is this what my cancer feels like? All my labs came back ok, HCT is down to 30 which is worrisome, but other than that everything else ok. But something in the back of my brain kept saying, get the abscess taken care of! So, I insisted and after waiting for some time the ER doc lanced the abcess (again, in a MOST uncomfortable place, so you can get an idea of how desperate I must have been!). So, I am sitting funny, BUT, today I woke up and for the first time in days I actually felt NORMAL!
So, the moral to my story is that we are the judges of our own bodies and their reactions to illness and injury, whether it is due to the cancer or not. How I was feeling (vertigo, pain, fatigue, etc) is my body’s way of saying that SOMETHING is not right, no matter what the numbers say. My body was working on some kind of infectious process, and who knows what shape I would be in if I hadn’t insisted that they PLEASE do something about it. It ISN’T always the cancer, and therefore it is entirely possible that something that has nothing to do with surgery, radiation or chemo (the old “slash/burn and poison) can be done to fix it!