I Wish I Had Good News - 200th POST!

I wish I had better news on my 200th post, but I don't. I do have more excitement, however! Monday had plenty of madness involved, so it lived up to it's name in that respect.

The last couple of weeks I've had this small nagging pain in my left side. It was a dull pain that would kind of come and go... and with some more recent swelling -- I attributed it to just that. Figured it was just some swelling pressing up against something. Unfortunately, I was right but as with anything in my life this wasn't going to be easy. Early Monday morning I woke up almost crying from the pain it was shooting in my side so bad. I immediately got out of bed and took a variety of pain medications I had (within safe reason)... after about two hours of agonizing pain I finally felt some relief and started to snooze again. This had me missing the first half of the day at work and letting my boss know I wouldn't be coming in at least for a while. I called the doc in the morning and his scheduled turned out to be packed, and the receptionist suggested I go to the ER based on my symptoms. So that I did, and that turned out to be almost as painful as the pain itself (well, not really--but darn close!). I went into Salem's ER and it was packed as well. They were rather quick, doing a variety of tests right away with blood, urine, xray, blood pressure, etc. About four hours later I got a room and after another hour of waiting in the room the doctor arrived and told me what I had suspected all along--I had tissue of some sort folding under in my chest pressing up against my diaphragm which was causing all this pain. As the doctor was about ready to leave, he asked how long this had been going on... etc... etc... and said I had better have a CT to make sure it wasn't kidney stones as he was starting to think that could be a possible reason as well. I thought "oh no!" But I kept thinking to myself that it wasn't kidney stones... and after another hour, I found out I was right. The doc came in again and told me that news and also told me that the tissue is some sort of fatty tissue build-up in the same "tissue family" as what I had just gone through--but probably not cancer this time by the way it looked. I am hopeful that it is not, because after the chemo I had just weeks ago I doubt I would feel pain this quickly. That is my one good alibi out of all of this!

Later today (Tuesday) I will be going into work like normal, and then visiting my oncologist to find out where we will go from here--keeping my fingers crossed that this is not another 'cancer saga' I am faced with yet again.

So, I wanted this 200th post to be about reminicing about the previous 200 posts. About how I've taken this little blog a long ways in the past six years. It first started off as a small "side project" to my once huge website to turning into a "huge project" in my now small website. The little news blurp and top ten were always popular features of my website dovoted to cancer survivors. As my life moved along several different avenues (not forgetting my past), the blog took over the site discussing the other things going as well as the cancer scares along the years. Since cancer returned last year, the blog has been an enormously useful tool in communicating with my friends and family. It's useful interface has allowed me to communicate from almost anywhere -- not requiring any special software like my original website once did.

200 posts... I've come along way. 300, 400, 500... 1000 I am sure will come and go. Cancer scares or not, I plan on being with you through the long haul! Take care.... :-)

-LB