Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Tuning up at GF Strong: yet another setback meant singing the blues for awhile, but we're back with the booty-shaking music

Don't you. Forget about me. I'll be alone. Dancing. You know it. Baby.
We interrupt this suspect musical interlude with another look at rehab. It's been awhile, but, to recap, we into Week 2 here at GF Strong, a rehab facility near Children's Hospital in Vancouver.
We're battling yet another wacky setback, but, with the way the last four or five months have played, we'd be baffled if we weren't in the midst of something odd.
(No jokes about me picking lyrics from a band called Simple Minds, by the way. That would be mean. Remember, I HAVE CANCER, not to mention 15 screws and two rods in my back, plus whatever side effects I picked up after three surgeries to fight infection.)
A couple of days in here, I started to feel like my left leg was getting weaker. I mentioned to a couple of staff folk, but they wrote it off as me being tired. By Sunday, my left leg won't react at all to anything I tried to get it to do. It wouldn't fire, no matter the suggestion.
We turned yet again to Dr. Robert Lee, our surgeon from the VGH spine unit. He gave Carol-Ann his cell and his pager (yes, we're astoundingly lucky) and when we called him, he put the wheels in motion for an emergency MRI. We ended up having it done the following day at Richmond General. (If you ever need an MRI, try to get it done in Richmond -- it's huge, open-ended and they give you headphones to listen to the radio. The hour and 40 minutes passed by quite easily. It wasn't like being trapped in the hood of a Pinto with the engine running.)
The good news was that the results didn't show anything odd. Cancer was a concern (I have a Solitary Plasmacytoma, and it does have a huge recurrence rate) and so was a pocket of infection, but neither were apparent.
The bad news, of course, was that results didn't show anything. Dr. Lee wrote it off as my body being tired, and, with how brilliant he's been throughout this process, I won't be betting against him. And, for what it's worth, little movements have started to come back in the past couple of days.
It is much more hardcore here than at VGH. I wish I had listened to the nurses and aids at VGH when they told me to spend extra time in the wheelchair, roaming the halls on my own. On a busy day at VGH, I was up two hours. Here, I'm up seven or eight.
I'll get it figured out, though. I don't doubt that for one minute. I'll be home in no time. I may come back here, though, for karaoke night.

3 comments:

  1. May the current rehab phase at GFS be a satisfying hurdle to climb over. You'll get there, and then you'll be home, where your mind, heart and soul prefer to be (with your sweetie) full-time. Ben

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  3. How come it wasn't the same as being strapped to the hood of a Maverick? Kim

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