Pain is always relevant in the beginning…

Cancer always seems to start with some form of pain. I can remember the day my pain started. It was October 10, 2014. I’d gotten a massage because my back and shoulders were so tight from sitting at a desk all day. My job was starting to cause stress and I’m prone to carrying it in my neck and shoulders.

There was nothing unusual about that massage that day. It certainly didn’t hurt more or less than any massage I’d had in the past even though I was unusually tight across the shoulders. My left shoulder started to hurt after the fact. It was annoying. The massage therapist must have hit something or didn’t totally finish working the knot out in that shoulder. I had already booked one in another two weeks. I had too much to do in the next little bit to think of the pain, the next weekend I was finally going to graduate from university with my Master’s Degree. It was hard earned and this graduation I deserved to attend.

I was excited I was graduating. I’d get to visit friends and past co-workers that I hadn’t seen since I moved the year before to start my job. I went back to the research centre where I’d started the long process of my remote sensing training so many years ago while I was still in my undergrad to visit everyone I’d left behind when I moved on to new beginnings the year before. While I was sitting there talking over everything we’d all done in the past year, I started messing with a mason jar that was half full of batteries. My left shoulder was acting up again and it felt like I could barely lift up the jar. That was unusual for me. I’m a pretty strong girl and I was left wondering what I could have done. It was maybe weighed seven pounds at most. Maybe it wasn’t the massage causing all of this pain.

I had my other massage. I had seriously considered cancelling because I’d never had that happen before but I wanted the damn pain gone so I kept my appointment. The massage therapist noticed there was swelling in my left shoulder and used ice on it to see if that would calm the pain and the swelling down.

A trip to Jasper on the weekend was amazing. It was nice to get away from everything for a few days and spend it with a friend that had come to visit for the weekend. The weekend was good and it was refreshing to show someone the mountains that had never seen anything like them before in their life. An ache had started in my lower back and my hips. The weather was changing. It’s fall in Alberta. It’s cold and standing around outside in it too long can cause the back and hips to ache. Nothing I haven’t felt before. There definitely wasn’t anything unusual happening with my body.

A few more weeks had gone by and my left arm wasn’t getting any better. I decided to look in to acupuncture and get some physical therapy done. I went to therapy religiously. It seemed that every time we tackled something that another new area would crop up and hurt. We’d work on my neck and shoulders, two days later it would be my hips and lower back.

Finally the weekend came near the end of November that I finally had to make a doctor’s appointment for the pain. I was having problems getting out of bed the pain was so severe. After some initial testing, the Dr figured that the pain was being caused by fibromyalgia. He would do blood work to rule out various forms of arthritis. He would prescribe medication for me in the meantime but I’d need to get the blood work done to go any further.

By this time it’s the second week in December, 2014. I’m sitting in the Dr’s office waiting for the results of the blood work and I’m still in so much pain. It’s only a walk-in clinic and the odds of me seeing the same Dr again are possible but mine has stepped out for a while. I can either choose to wait for him to come back or see a different Dr. I opt for a different one. I hurt too much to sit there and wait for the other to come back. The new Dr confirms that the tests didn’t show any arthritis but something weird came up in my blood and I need to see a specialist. He’ll set up a referral for me to see a rheumatologist in Edmonton. He confirmed that I most likely do have fibromyalgia though and upped my level of pain meds so I could be more comfortable in the meantime.

Fibromyalgia means chronic pain for the rest of my life. I wasn’t comfortable with that diagnosis because that meant that the pain that we couldn’t seem to manage to control was going to be with me until the end. The Dr and I had discussed taking narcotics. I was leery of that option because of addiction but if this pain was going to continue at the rate it was going, narcotics felt like they would definitely be in my future.

I worked at a small company at this time. People were starting to wonder what was going on with me. I was sitting at work with a heating pad on my shoulders and a heating pad strapped to my back. It was the only way I could get any pain relief at this point. One of my co-workers even suggested that there might be something wrong with me given the amount of pain I was in and the length of time I’d been in pain. I’d already been to the Dr and had been told it was fibromyalgia.

My mom knew I was struggling with daily pain and wanted to help me out. She decided that she was going to come down and stay with me on her Christmas break. She would drive down and spend some time with me. We’d then drive to my parent’s house and spend Christmas there. From there we would go to my brother’s house for a few days and then come home. By this point, I can barely walk because the pain is so bad. I’ve managed to convince the Dr to give me a handicapped permit but he would only go as far as a temporary permit for 3 months.

The pain seems to be increasing on a daily rate. My health just seems to have gone downhill so fast that I don’t even know what to think any more. We had to cancel the plans of going to my parent’s. I was in too much pain and they have stairs. I decided I would have a baking soda/salt bath because it had been recommended to me for help with some of the pain. My mom was against it but I was as determined as ever. It was during this bath that I felt a lump in my left breast but didn’t think anything of it because once I got out of the tub, I couldn’t find it anywhere. So I pushed it to the back of my head.

I’m not certain when but I also had a dream at this point. I dreamed that a friend of mine had cancer. I was devastated because there was nothing I could do to help. It turned out they were wrong in the dream. I had test results come back. They told me I had cancer in my left shoulder and they were going to have to amputate my left arm. I remember waking up and telling everyone that I’d had the weirdest dream the night before.

I knew my mom needed a break from dealing with me and my pain so the scheduled trip to my brother’s house was going to go through as planned. We got in her vehicle and drove there. She did spent that night but promptly left the next day hoping that my brother would be able to convince me to go to the Dr for the pain. I wasn’t against going; I just didn’t feel that they would be able to do anything for me since I was already diagnosed with a chronic pain issue.

December 28, 2014. I probably won’t forget this day. I woke up and showered. I was still in pain but I was determined. I hadn’t been able to go Christmas shopping and buy anything for my brother’s kids, so it was on my agenda for the day. I got up to shower and was having a bit more pain than usual. I talked to my sister-in-law and asked her if she’d be able to take me to the hospital after I was done shopping. I went to Walmart to shop because they have the mobility carts and figured that would be an easy way to get around. My brother had driven me. By the time we’d gotten back to his house I was thoroughly exhausted and even more in pain. There are three concrete steps going in to his house. They defeated me that day. I could not take the steps I needed to get in to the house. The pain of even lifting my leg was too much. I had to use the washroom and I wanted to give the kids the presents I’d bought. That was the only thing that made me go back in to the house that day instead of straight to the hospital. My brother dragged me up those stairs while I screamed from the pain that I was in while his children watched. I’d never ever been in that kind of pain in my entire life.

My sister-in-law got ready to take me to the hospital. She got a wheelchair as soon as we got there so I wouldn’t have to walk any more. When we finally saw the Dr, I just wanted everything to be over with. He seemed nice and was a newer Dr to the community. I explained to him what was going on. He gave me the answer that I was expecting and had been avoiding hearing by going to the Emergency Room. I wasn’t from there so at most he could do was giving me some pain meds and send me on my way. He did listen to me. I explained to him that the walk in clinic where I was from had done blood work and something unusual had shown up and a rheumatologist appointment was getting booked for me. He figured that they might have been testing for lupus so he would check my liver function. The blood work came back and showed that it wasn’t an issue with my liver. It was an issue with my kidneys and they were shutting down. I’d need to be transferred to a hospital in Edmonton by ambulance and they would look after me there.

I was prepped to go with my catheter and my IV line and promptly sent on the bumpiest ambulance ride to the Royal Alex. This is where things start to get fuzzy. Between the morphine on the ride there and the Dilaudid they constantly had me, on stuff would get forgotten. They found a bed for me on the surgical ward and kept taking blood to see if my kidneys were improving. At some point, my O2 stats went down and I needed to be hooked up to oxygen. Finally a Dr came to me to have a discussion. My kidneys had been failing from all the prescription anti-inflammatory meds I’d been pumping for the pain and that with all of the tests they’ve been running on my kidneys, they’d noticed that the calcium levels in my blood were high. They were going to have to do more tests but it looked like I either had an issue with my endocrine system or that I had cancer. To be continued…