I’ve been moving ahead with life post treatment. Doing a little activism, hanging out in social media, making life decisions, you know – the usual stuff. My hair continues to grow like a weed, I have more energy, and I’m more active. All in all, pretty good. I feel good.
These past two weeks have been my quarterly medical extravaganza, as I call it. Trips to primary care, my gyn-surgeon, my oncologist for a checkup. The news is all good – Arimidex does not appear to have much of a negative impact – certainly cholesterol, blood pressure, yada yada are all fine – actually quite good. I have some stiffness in my joints – in particular, my hands are rather stiff and my right hand little finger is recalcitrant. It doesn’t like be part of a fist. Sigh. So much for boxing. More immediate, however, is the fact that I cannot make a fist and pound on the knife to smash garlic. So, I’m learning to use my left hand to smash down the knife.
Even my knee has been improving. Left knee has very little cartilage on the inner joint surface and I am looking at a replacement at some point. But for now, I’ve been doing a lot of physiotherapy, walking, and the knee has felt quite a lot better. I walked a lot over the weekend, and might have overwhelmed it, however.
On Monday I went to the oncologist. Again, everything was fine. As he said, I am “healthy”. In cancerspeak, I’m NED (No Evidence of Disease). And I had a Zometa infusion. Zometa is a biophosphonate, which, if I understand this correctly, is an antibody that helps strengthen bones and gives a little added protection for the prevention of bone mets. Breast cancer, especially hormone positive such as mine can keep on giving years after with distant mets.
That’s why it’s critical to encourage and support more research into metastatic disease, and to support women and men with metastatic disease. But I’ll write more about that soon.
Treatments like Zometa are used twice yearly in patients who are at risk of bone loss, more often in patients who’ve actually got bone mets. I guess I still am a patient in this sense. Oh well. I’ll get it twice a year as long as I’m on Arimidex (the estrogen eliminator) to keep as much bone as I can. And the infusion itself was fine. A little wiggy after the infusion (which contained my favorite steroids), but made it fine home on the train, and fine to sleep. Ok yesterday morning, too.
But at some point yesterday, both knees began to hurt_like_hell. Hard to get up. Left knee worse than the right. I have meds for pain, and I took a small dose of steroid, so now it seems to be improving. Sucky way to start the day, though.
I have a huge stash of movies, books and endless hours of amusement on the internet. I’m making myself get up every hour at least and walk around the apartment. The more I walk, the better it feels. I am stretching when I’m sitting still. I’m doing as much as I can to make this last as briefly as possible.
The dog is enjoying a sleepy day too… she’s sacked out on one of her 3 beds. Hmmm… I have only one bed. What’s wrong with this picture?
