Cascade

Here's a post about effects and side-effects, and remedies and solutions. 

I have ongoing chronic pain in my right side, all around my hepatectomy scar (liver removal; keep up).

The pain starts in my back, probably because I had back pain long before I had cancer.

I also have pain in my shoulder which may or may not be referred from my diaphragm (a wiring anomaly that doctors know about and adds to their smugness).

I have been managing this pain in various ways, depending on how much it freaks me out on any given day. 

In the absence of any new or ongoing treatment for the actual cancer I think I started to miss being a patient, so I decided to go and see about having my pain "managed". Usually this would involve drugs, but I am one of those extremely irritating patients who refuses to take tablets and believes in Other Options (No angel therapy. Yet). So I plumped for an epidural injection into my spine cos like that's so natural and wholesome. 

I think it might have worked. The two hours spent in the public waiting room watching HSE propaganda was well worth it anyway. I learned about all sorts of public health promotion stuff that my employer - sorry, Statutory-Body-With-Whom-I-Share-A-Contract-But-Who-Has-No-Obligations-To-My-Wellbeing-Or-Occupational-Safety - is funding and disseminating, and got to see lots of my friends in clever patient-safety videos and advice clips. 

I also signed up for a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programme for people with secondary cancer. Now we're talking wholesome. 
Because I have the temerity to be a working cancerhead, I had to jiggle around my surgery hours to allow me to go along to the course in the middle of a Wednesday morning. This meant I arrived on the first day after an hour of helping a patient with chronic enduring mental illness deal with his most recent bout of paranoia. I was in my work clothes and in my work headspace. It took me a while to settle in, and the urge to jump out of the beautiful Georgian window was overwhelming. But I stuck with it, and made it to the Body Scan part, and had a good snore for ten minutes. 
And, what do you know, I felt all sorts of better on my way back to find out if my patient had chosen to go quietly or via the Retrieval Team...

The stress of the Dying/Not Dying Black Hole of Uncertainty has resulted in my teeth-grinding habit reaching new levels of viciousness, such that I managed to crack one of my molars right down the middle a couple of months ago. The dentist had offered me the choice of root canal surgery or extraction, and really the only part that I listened to, while he explained the pros and cons, was the One Thousand Euros versus One Hundred Euros bit. He also used some line about "we're all living longer and like to keep all our teeth for as long as possible", so that kind of sealed the deal for me. There was also the salient matter of me never having had a tooth out before, therefore stupidly assuming it would be easy peasy. 

I put off having it done for a while, because I was organising a conference and making myself feel indispensable. As soon as I was dispensable again, I booked myself in, but chickened out again at the last minute because I was going to be single-parenting that evening and instinct told me I may need back up if it all went pear-shaped. 

Good old instinct. When I went to the rescheduled appointment it did, indeed, all go pear-shaped. It felt like he was removing my symphysis pubis via my mouth. He pulled and pulled and yanked and wiggled and heaved and splintered and drilled and wrenched. And little fragments of my tooth pinged into the steel bowl, and off the overhead light, and across the room. Tears were streaming down my face and I could feel myself getting the all-over body shakes that I remember after having my sections, but without the lovely oxytocin rush. I didn't even manage to deliver the tooth. The fecker is still in there now, crushed and broken, but clinging onto my mandible like a tumour to a portal vein. 

Now I have to go to the root canal surgeon. And presumably pay her a thousand euros.