The One with the Bone Marrow Biopsy

I'm hoping that at this point most of you have realized that the titles of my blog posts were inspired by the show Friends, which I have been re-watching. If you haven't seen it yet, you should. And then watch The Office.

Look, Joey and Chandler are ready to battle cancer with me...because chemo starts this coming Wednesday!



Yesterday was my bone marrow biopsy, which, as I was told before the procedure, is pretty awful. It was. Unfortunately this is just one of the things that comes with being diagnosed with cancer. Basically, my doctor, two lab techs, a nurse, a medical assistant, and Henry all surrounded a bed where I was laying face down on my stomach with my lower back open and ready to be poked. Everyone just sort of awkwardly stood around as the nurse introduced them. They all laughed when I lifted my head to call "hey everyone, how's it going?" Then Dr. Baatz, my oncologist, injected the lidocaine into my hip area. It burned, but only for a couple seconds. After that they injected it deeper, but I couldn't feel that one. Then she made a small nick in my skin with a scalpel, but I couldn't feel it because they had numbed me so well.

After that, she took a much larger needle (and bear in mind, my face is in a pillow and cannot see anything), and began to poke into my back left hip. This was the part that hurt - but not a sharp pain, just a ton of pressure, like she was trying to break my hip. They, unfortunately, didn't get a big enough piece of bone marrow the first time so they had to do it all over again. After they had a better piece, they took a syringe and tried to suck up some liquid bone marrow from the cavity, but didn't get any. This part hurts too, kind of like a burn in your side, but it's over quickly. After everything was done they put a huge a bandage on, and I was really sore. Still pretty sore today.

Today is the heart and lungs tests, which, by contrast, will probably seem like a lot of fun :) But tomorrow is my 5:30 a.m. surgery to get my port put in (much too early for surgery, in my humble opinion). And chemo starts next week! Time to start getting better!

Current side effects and complaints: sore left hip and tired