Hi All,
If yo yu have been following my journey, you will have learned by now that when you get Cancer, you enter a war with one of the worst diseases known. Cancer doesn't care about you, it cares about itself.
When you face Cancer head on, you truly go to war against it. And as in any war, to win you have to keep fighting the battles of war. Just when you've beaten one battle, another comes along. Some of those battles aren't directly cancer related, but they are collateral damage caused by your fight against the cancer.
Case in point. The biggest battle for me so far has been beating back the cancer to the point of regression, and in some cases almost making the cancer undetectable. That was a huge win in this war. However, to win that battle, I had to put my body through 5 surgeries, 2 nephrostomy tubes, one radiation treatment, 4 rounds of chemotherapy, and two rounds of immunotherapy. From all that, I suffered some collateral damage to other parts of my body.
My kidneys took a significant beating through all of this. They had to seriously work overtime at clearing out toxins, and the cancer had blocked my ureters from allowing my kidneys to drain that they became inflamed and damaged. The immunotherapy treatments were also found to have been damaging my kidneys. With the steroid treatment I am now undergoing, my kidneys are returning to normal function again. Slowly but surely.
The other major collateral damage I suffered during the battle with cancer, was a weakening/stiffening of certain muscle groups in my body.
For the better part of nine months, I have not been able to be very active for very long. This was due to the sheer amount of time I was either bed ridden for not able to actively move around (with nephrostomy tubes, catheters, recovery from surgery, etc.) While I tried to keep my muscles moving as much as I could, it was not easy.
It seems that one of the large muscles (the piriformis) muscle (basically your glute muscle) has stiffened and tightened. The muscle then pushes on my sciatica nerve which is causing me great pain in my left leg at times, making it difficult to move or get appropriate exercise to help the muscle.
To fix this problem, I will have to do regular, stretching and strengthening exercises on that muscle, however given the pain right now, it is very difficult.
The doctors are now trying to develop a good pain management plan in order to allow me to get through the days with minimal pain, and allow me to do more active movements.
Obviously beating back the cancer to the point of remission was the biggest battle won so far. These collateral damage battles will get fixed too. It just takes time, patience, and "less pain".
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