"OCF Down Under" "Above & Beyond" Member (500+ posts) Joined: May 2010 Posts: 638 | Hi Kathy Sorry bit slow on catching up with the question but I'm here now. Alex's "electric shock" started happening 2 months out from treatment and went from his neck to the balls of his feet. He suffered stepping off kerbs and any sort of jolt to his body. Not painful so much as it kept suprising him. 18 months out from treatment, he says it has eased off but just last week started complaining about "lightening bolts" going from the outside of his hip to the inside of his knee - especially when he went to bend over (sounds like femoral nerve involvement which is another long nerve). It doesn't stop him doing anything except feeding the cat and cleaning the bath. He is currently training the cat to use a can opener. I am unsure how he found out that he couldn't clean the bath since this is a once in a decade activity and he did it the year before last. But I digress ... the aches and pains are more annoyance than debilitating nowadays.
Unfortunately, sometimes they get him down a bit when he thinks he is moving one step forward and two steps back. I have to remind him that the reason he is noticing the little aches and pains is because he is not being distracted by the "shoot me now" pains that needed narcotics to control.
He is actually going 3 steps forward and 1 step back. This time last year he couldn't stay awake beyond 8.30pm and was on daily codeine based narcotics, struggled to follow complex ideas to their conclusion and was depressed and highly irritable. Today he takes an over the counter pain med about once a week when his back pain gets the better of him (he had a lung collapse and subsequent lung resection right in the middle of chemo just to make life interesting), keeps regular "old fart" hours (in bed by 10ish), is back to reading his SciFi books and can keep enough ideas in his head to solve the problems of the world.
Karen Love of Life to Alex T4N2M0 SCC Tonsil, BOT, R lymph nodes Dx March 2010 51yrs. Unresectable. HPV+ve Tx Chemo x 3+1 cycles(cisplatin,docetaxel,5FU)- complete May 31 Chemoradiation (IMRTx35 + weekly cisplatin) Finish Aug 27 Return to work 2 years on 3 years out Aug 27 2013 NED  Still underweight
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