Big respect to all the Mummy's out there

Hi peeps,
Why the blog title you are asking??
Well we had quite an exciting day on Friday - NOT!! The day was going well, I'd cleared a number of chores and chose to take Hayley out for lunch before finally dropping the insurance paperwork for our December holiday off at the post office. Then I walked home.....and I started to get discomfort in my lower back - around the kidneys. Oh well not an issue, however as I got closer to home, the pain levels increased and of course every ache and pain is referenced to the Lymphoma and Chemo.

Well to cut to the chase, I got Hayley to take me to the emergency department - her stress levels were high, it was pouring with rain, heavy traffic and a Dad sitting in the passenger seat in significant amounts of pain and making sure poor old Hayley knew that!!! As it panned out the ED quickly gave me some morphine, did all their tests (would you believe, BP, temp & pulse were normal!) and sent me for yet another CT scan. Well by the end of the CT I'm afraid my language was extremely poor, pain was rated 11/10 and PLEASE CAN I HAVE MORE MORPHINE!!

So what was happening to poor old Hairy - it appears that I had a kidney stone - is that it you ask? Well with the amount of pain, and discomfort that came on on Friday, my respect for all those Mummy's has increased big time.   I only had to cope with pain for a few hours and they do say a kidney stone is as bad as delivering babies!!! I was lucky that the meds I was given plus a bit of luck passing the stone meant that this episode was pretty short lived, thankfully.   The hospital kept me in over night for observation and it appears that the kidney stone is probably related to my body trying to dispose of the Chemo & Lymphoma - so I am potentially at higher risk of these types of issues.

So apologies to the family for giving them quite a fright - it was nice that Hayley stood and held my hand, however I think it was her that needed the hand holding.   I recommend that whoever you are that you avoid kidney stones - pain like you would not believe!!!

I'm due to start chemo 4 on Tuesday, which will be a B type chemo, and you may recall I had big reactions when I had the first B chemo with the rash, issues with body temperature control and so on.  So it will be interesting to see how I react during this session.  We will have to wait and see.

Prior to the kidney stone episode, during the week Tony sent me for another bone marrow biopsy.  We had discussed the case for potentially taking bone marrow earlier rather than later for use in a stem cell transplant.  The situation is similar in both cases of early or late harvesting, early harvesting requires the bone marrow to obviously be 'clean', late harvesting may be more difficult to achieve due to the impact of all the chemo sessions.  Anyway the biopsy will give Tony a heads up as to where we stand at the moment.  My head is saying that we may be a bit early yet.

I'll let you know how I get on with Chemo 4 this coming week.  Behave all of you!!

Alan