Excuse me, my Lady is in excruciating pain, she is living on multiple high test pain killers and penultimate narcotics, you've run every alphabet soup test you can think of and the answer is, "There is nothing there?" Huh?
The oncologists had a confab today, triggered in part by my phone calls to each of them first thing this AM. The MRI was negative. To the limits of the test (and I've written about the sneaky nature of microscopic cholangiocarcinoma previously) the source of the pain does not appear to be a tumor or a cancer. That, of course, is good news. And, the same answer we had in mid-December.
The bad news is that they don't know what is causing the pain.
What they did tell us is that they are referring Mary to the pain center on a "stat" basis. (Trivia bit, stat is short for the Latin word statim which translates to immediately. I just had to know.) And, there was discussion about a spinal specialist. I don't know what the basis of that part of the message was.
The call came to Mary at the house while I was at work. Well, she is doped up with fentanyl and morphine so we are not exactly sure what the message was. Don't you just love the medical folks some times? Let me give this really complex information to a patient who is higher than a kite on narcotics--Mary was so out of it she didn't even put the phone on speaker so her daughter could listen at the same time! Thankfully, Mary wrote the message bearer's name down and I will try to talk to her in the morning.
We feel relief that the answer is, again, no cancer. And very frustrated and concerned that the cause is so elusive.
Lara arrived early this afternoon from Pasadena. MaryR had volunteered to sit with Mary for the time between my departure for work at noon and Lara's arrival expected to be about 3PM. MaryR did that and reported that Mary slept the whole time. When Lara arrived before 2PM, they had a changing of the guard, Mary woke long enough to take another dose of morphine and then proceeded to sleep until I got home about 7pm. We fixed a chicken dinner but Mary didn't eat much at all, she had begun tossing her food again today and she stopped eating because the involuntary muscles were doing it again.
Modern technology. After we ate, Lara fired up her laptop and had a video chat with her husband, Scott, and her two daughters in Pasadena. Today's kids are growing up with video chat technology like i grew up with television. My Dad told stories about the installation of a telephone while he was growing up--and that no one was allowed to answer it when it rang except his Dad (my grandpa). Why? That newfangled technology was possibly dangerous and it took a man to work it safely! As for Lara's girls, last year they experienced daily video chats during breakfast with their Daddy while he was on assignment in New Zealand. The world changes...
Next stop for Mary is the Stanford pain center. i will keep you posted.
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