Shoot 'Em Up

I had my first Myer's Cocktail yesterday. It's an IV infusion of vitamins. Lots of vitamins. Then I had shots of B12 and D, right in my butt. I'm dipping my toe into the alternative medicine pool. I'm not quite sure yet how I like the water.

Oddly, the Myer's Cocktail triggered the asthma, which was on the edge anyway. I would start to ramp up into an acute attack and then it would fade away and then it would repeat over the course of the infusion. It was strange.

As usual, no one could get a vein, but they had some hot packs on hand and I drank some water. So, after three sticks and two IV solution bubbles under my skin, they finally got a line in.

I feel/felt pretty awful as a result. I don't know if that's because I'm fighting a bug or just because I'm me. When I had my first massage ever, it gave me such a terrible hangover, I was sick for two days. Sometimes when you stir the pot, you get yuck stew.

I spent most of the afternoon in bed just resting. And wheezing.

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Reporting In

Went down to 10mg. Which means I took a nap. After spending most of the day on the couch. The toddler snuggled with me most of the day.

I feel good. Awake. Conscious. Not lost in the murky fog of mental malfunction. I don't even want to tell you how bad my driving was before I started increasing the prednisone. More near miss accidents than I have had in my entire driving career compressed into a period of just a few days kind of bad.

The back stuff is weird still though, but now more in the kidneys. Like things are swollen or inflamed still. I wish it would go away. Or get bad enough to communicate properly with doctors via lab results. Either way, but could we please stop camping in limbo?

Contemplating the taper to come as the birth control pills run out tonight and that always seems to make me feel bad adrenally. An adrenal patient told me they read in a textbook that menstrual cycles = low cortisol which would really explain a lot. I told the endo back in August that things as simple as my period were stressing my body out.

I failed to impress the endo with that tidbit.

However, more than once, to the point of being a pattern, stress dosing needs have coincided with my cycle. As have the asthma and viral infections. It all likes to hit at the same time.

Conveniently the toddler seems to have boogies. So the monthly gauntlet should reconvene any minute now. Just when I need to drop the steroid dose.

I also got a chest x-ray today, ordered by the pcp because...you know, I'm not actually sure why. I think the idea was to get a better image of my lungs than when I was so ill as I did have some airway collapse in March that made for a less than stellar view of my innards.

I wonder if they will be able to see the tumor or not? It was originally discovered via contrast CT.

I have been reading about Hypercalcemia, Hyperparathryoidism, Pheochromocytoma, Sarcoidosis and Vitamin D Hypersensitivity.

Just because.

Anything is possible, but not always likely.

I stopped taking Vitamin D just in case. You never know. Thanks to comments from Tracy that made me go back over all the vitamins with a critical eye.

Although I am not taking near enough D to have problems with it unless something else has gone wrong in my body first, but if there is a base I can cover, I will do so. I thought it was kind of interesting how Vitamin D Hypersensitivity intersected with Sarcoidosis, Hypercalcemia, and Hyperparathyrodism. Didn't think there would be a common factor.

I also stopped calcium supplements for the time being.

17 days until the next doc appointment. I need to work on lowering my expectations dramatically between now and then. For some reason I am hopeful and I know better than to think there will be any answers or help.

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Bloody Good News

I heard today from the hematologist's physician's assistant (sounds redundant or at least like three people are involved) that my red-blood-cell count is now in normal range, so I don't have to get any more blood siphoned off for a while. I'll need to get my blood checked again at the end of the month. The condition I have is polycythemia vera. The hematologist said it's not from chemo, but who knows? It might be. It's a rare disease and so not studied much. It seems to me that if the chemo drug Adriamycin, which I was given, can lead to leukemia, and that PV can turn into leukemia, then chemo could cause PV. Or is that a logical fallacy?

At the same time I had my blood checked for red blood cells, I got it checked for Vitamin D level. I'd read about a study that links low Vitamin D levels with breast cancer recurrence. The oncologist's physician's assistant said that she was going to the conference where she would hear a presentation by the team from Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto that did the study. The tricky thing is that having high levels of D can be harmful, too. As Aristotle said, Everything in moderation.

Is it possible to have excess in moderation?

The odd thing is I'm looking all this up and it doesn't seem connected to me. It feels so abstract. Even the breast cancer feels like it happened to me but at a distance. Does this mean I haven't accepted that I had it? Have I been keeping up a wall of denial all this time? That doesn't seem possible. Or is it that I don't feel sick so I can't believe that cancer is lurking in me?

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