Over the past week, I’ve started having pain in my left leg. This isn’t the leg that started the whole mess, and as far as I know my cancer hasn’t metastasized to that leg. Our best guess has been that the pain is being caused by my white blood cells being repaired due to my treatment.

That doesn’t lessen the pain, however, and it had been getting worse each day. By Friday night of this week I was taking more than my usual amount of pain killers and was still in so much pain that I could barely sit with my kids for our weekly movie night.

I woke up around one in the morning with my left leg feeling like it was being torn off, and moved out to the living room to let my wife sleep in peace while I grunted and groaned. I finally decided to call the non-emergency line for my doctor’s on-call nurse, to tell them what was happening and see if they wanted to schedule some tests for this other leg.

The first time I called, the automated system hung up on me.

The second time I called and managed to leave a message. I got a call back within two minutes, from a different doctor who told me he had no idea who I was or why I was leaving him a message at one in the morning.

The third time I called and left another message; As far as I know this one went to the right place. I took more pain killers and stayed up until about three thirty, then went back to bed once the pain had subsided.

When I woke up this morning, the pain was gone. Not lessened, just gone. I have no idea what caused the pain, or if it’s going to come back, but for right now it seems to have gone away. I’m scheduled to meet with my oncologist first thing Monday morning, so maybe he’ll have an idea just what the hell that was all about.

Things are going about as well as can be expected at the moment.

As of my last PET scan, all of the visible cancer has been eradicated except for the original spot in my right femur. The fact that this spot hasn’t been taken out by my chemotherapy worried the oncologist enough to change my treatment regimen. The new drugs are much more powerful, and are causing a lot more fatigue than I’d had previously. For a few days after my treatment started, I was barely able to get out of bed. At one point I tried to play a video game and found that the tips of my fingers were too fatigued to work correctly, which was a surprise.

My legs and hips are in a lot of pain, but I have medication to help manage it. I am getting a bit concerned about the amount of pain medication I’ve had to take lately, but I’ve always been paranoid about prescription drugs. I’m currently taking between 10mg and 30mg of percocet each day, so we’ll see how that effects me long term.

Psychologically, I’ve taken a bit of a hit lately. I’ve been able to keep up a pretty positive attitude about all of this, but a recent talk with the staff who are managing my bone marrow transplant shook me a bit. The doctor casually mentioned that the transplant means there’s a 10-20% chance that I’ll be dead before Christmas, which something of a shock. He later walked it back a bit, saying that those numbers included all transplant patients, and I was on the younger and healthier end, but still… those numbers aren’t something I like thinking about.

My next round of chemotherapy starts next Monday, and two weeks after that I’m going in for more PET scans and tests. The results of these tests will determine whether or not we can proceed with the transplant, or if I will need to start a new chemo regimen with the addition of radiation therapy. I should know a lot more then.