The chemo, or targeted therapy, that oncology put me on to help prevent any remaining cancer cells in my body from taking hold and growing is working (as evidenced by my last scan being clean). However, it not only has been working on the cancer cells, but it has been working hard on other parts of my body – in a not good way.
One of the side effects of the medication that I’ve had is a lot of pain. Muscle pain, joint pain, just pain everywhere all the time. One spot would hurt, so I’d try to baby it for a while and then another spot would hurt and this would continue. Not just a little pain either, but fairly significant amounts of pain. Pain management and palliative care were working together to find something that would help, but eventually, it got to where I was going to have to go on opioids for the pain to make day-to-day life tolerable.
In an attempt to avoid opioids, my oncologist and I made the decision to cut my chemo dose in half. There have been studies done with people in stage IV that this has still been effective, but it is too new to have been studied in my case to see if it is effective or not. Since the studies are promising, we decided to give it a go and see how it works in hopes that it will decrease the amount of pain I’m in each day.