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On 5/17/2007 Dothedewmom wrote:Hello all,
I have posted several messages on here before and have always gotten some great advice. Now I turn to you all again. My mother has NSCLC stage 4 with several mets. Anyway she is taking Taxol/Avastin/Carboplatin for her chemo. The past week she has been having some terrible bone pain. She says sometimes it feels like her bones are breaking. I have read and reread the info on these chemos and none of them say anything about bone pain. I can not call her doctor because I am not on her medical release form so they will not give me any information and she doesn't want to call because she goes next Wednesday for another PET scan. She feels like she is a bother to her doctors. I tell her that if her insurance is paying these doctors $14,000 for each chemo treatment then she is surely not a bother. Anyway I just wanted to know if anyone else has dealt with the bone pain before. Her doctor's have already changed her pain medicine to Oxycotin. Sometimes it helps sometimes it doesn't. I hope someone can give us some advice. Thanks ahead of time and God bless all who are fighting this terrible disease.
The best information I've found for this is at cancercare.org. They will send you information on any topic to your home that you request. I have NSCLC and I'm in my 30s. It is can be quite painful, especially that particular regimine. I'm on my 4th round of chemotherapy. The one your loved one is going through was my first experience with chemo and those chemicals are very hard. She needs to tell her doctor, anything and everything, that is hurting or bothering her. She is paying for the service, and doctors, especially oncology doctors, do not like to hear that their patients are in pain. They want to control that pain and make the experience as less stressful and as easy as possible.
When I switched to my 2nd round of chemo, I had some symptoms that I didn't tell my doctor about and it almost cost me my life. My cell counts got too low and I developed a staph infection. I was new to the experience so I didn't think it was anything out of the ordinary. I had to learn the hard way to make sure I vocalized to my oncologist what was going on with me. It is good to keep a "pain" diary when you have pain what kind on a 1 to 10 scale, how long it lasted and where.
Bone pain is the worst pain a person can experience going through cancer, I think, beside the neuropathy. The website below might help too. But the only thing that really works for me is the pain management plan I take for the pain in my bones. I used to take loritab but now I am on a small dose of morphine. It keeps my pain in check, and if I have a sharp spike in pain, I also have a small dose that gets me through that spike, so I am at least comfortable. My doctor has asked me several times, "How much pain medication is too much?" He said it is however much you need not to be in pain. Some of folks I now like to use Fentanyl patches too. There are a lot of slow releasing pain meds that will help her feel a lot better. However, with this you can easily get constipated, so eat lots of fiber and if you still can't go, I recommend Miralax. It used to be a prescription only drug, but has now gone OTC. Its tasteless and you can mix it in anything. I usually drink a glass of this everyday and it works for me.
http://www.cancercare.org/pdf/booklets/ccc_lung_bone_care.pd
http://www.healthtalk.com/lungcancer/programs/16_480/index.c
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