I can’t pinpoint when I first started to feel bad. I know that the first symptoms I noticed were the hurting in my right arm and shoulder. I complained to my doctors and got the pat answers. You are getting older and we all get arthritis or bursitis. Not wanting to be a pest, I continued to work in pain. My symptoms increased and so did my complaints to my doctor. I tried to explain that I was even more tired than usual. I truly felt that I could melt in my chair and slide into a pool on the floor at work. When I related this, it only brought condescending smiles to my doctor’s face. Well you do work nights was one of his replies.

After losing my house in a divorce, a whole other story, I was forced to rent a house. Because I was always cold, (cancer symptoms?), I requested that my landlord fix our heating system. The day he came to fix the floor furnace, he didn’t have all of the needed parts to fix it and would have to come back the next day. I was half asleep while fixing breakfast after work one day. I tripped over my dog and some parts from the furnace. This caused me to hit my arm on the corner of the wall. Little did I know that this would save my life.

The pain increased and sent me to the emergency room at work. While viewing my x-rays, the doctor turned to me and asked, “how bad does that hurt?” I laughed and said, “why, what did I do? Work with it broken?” “Oh, Lillie I wish you had” the doctor replied. “I really don’t know what it is but it is not good.” For twenty-four hours I had to let my imagination run wild. Armed with my x-rays, I arrived at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, California, the next morning. I had no idea this would be the beginning of a 16 year sojourn through the medical system.

I only had a brief experience on this side of the desk in the past. There were more x-rays, Cat scans, MRI’s, bone scans, and biopsies. I had to travel 200 miles to Los Angles for a consultation, but the doctor would not operate because he felt that it would be to hard to watch me after surgery from this distance. The final diagnosis? Bone cancer of my right arm. Kaiser finally found a doctor outside their system, and I was scheduled for surgery. Me, the girl who never catches colds, woke up to the mother of all colds on the day of the surgery. I had to wait an additional five days to wonder and ponder my fate. I woke up after eight hours of surgery to have my doctors tell me everything went well and all I had to do was rest and let my arm heal.

I‘ll stop here and we will pick this up again later. This journey has been quite a TRIP!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 7:47 pm and is filed under My Journey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.