Monday, September 9, 2013

Physical therapy

Today Marshall started his physical therapy and so far, so good. He made it through the hour doing very smooth and easy stretches and moves. This will be a good thing.


And I want to thank Catherine for her suggestion. Yesterday I gave a lot of thought to all of the tweaks and changes we've made with regard to medications, etc., in the past weeks that might be causing the terrible leg pain that Marshall has been having.

I started out researching the easy stuff (Plavix, Prilosec, Zantac) and then I started paging back through the notes I take every time we go to the Cancer Center and I was reminded that in addition to the miracle drug Zytiga, Marshall has been on a quarterly Lupron shot. This shot was in the hip and always left Marshall bedridden for at least two days with really bad injection pain.

So the oncologist suggested that instead of Lupron they start giving Marshall Zoladex which is a quarterly implant in the stomach that releases the medication slowly over the three months. He said that it was exactly the same drug, just administered differently. His first Zoladex implant was in August which is about when the pain started building up.

So I started researching side effects with Zoladex and one of the more prominent side effects was bone pain and that the bone pain usually subsides. I went on some cancer message boards and found guys whose Zoladex bone pain lasted only 5 to 7 days and others whose bone pain after getting the initial Zoladex implant lasted two months or more. So that made us both feel better.

We are now hopeful that the bone pain is going to start disappearing and in the meantime he is trying to manage it with Advil.

We go back for the next physical therapy appointment on Wednesday. The chief goal is to build some muscle strength in Marshall's legs.

And guess what I saw in the parking lot of the clinic in town? A scorpion! I am becoming a scorpion magnet.....


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