My back feels like one of those minefields in Sierra Leone Princess Di used to walk across in her UNICEF flak jacket for photo ops.
This picture is from about 40% of the way through a bone marrow biopsy. While 'bone marrow biopsy' sounds all sorts of medical, it is in fact a procedure with two parts, and the part that involves my back isn't really much more than, well, mining.
They use lidocaine or something like it to numb the area, and to be totally honest it never actually hurts. But, like the LIVE! DIRECT FROM HELL! THIS IS SPINAL TAP!!!!That I got a few hours later, there is something very deep and darkly about the level of invasion that makes it a really really lame way to spend twenty minutes.
Which is not to say that the Physician's Assistant who did it is not adept. She was phenomenal, not only doing less damage, but getting a much better sample than my first marrow check. N saw both from beginning to end, and was pleased and impressed with the size of the ookie bugger they slid from me this time.
The short version is that they manually drive a core-sampling needle into the bones of the back of your pelvis, and then they slurp out a bunch of marrow. Then they spirit it away and do science-y stuff with it. The junk they find inside, and the percentage of that junk that is lymphoblasts, indicate my progress--and I use the word progress the way the people rewriting the Texas schoolbooks see it: as a lot of pain and sickness and nausea. Oh no, wait; that's what they think of Evolution. Sorry.
My last marrow check made us aware that the I have hard strong bones. That is something I would be extremely proud of, something my Montana relatives and I would smilingly crow about, if it didn't make the digging and twisting into the pelvis so much more rough and tumble.
I described the first marrow check to N and the Dr digging me out then as "like a root canal in my butt." I stand by that: it is a thudding, nerve-deadened, internal ricochets of pounding on the inside of the skeleton.
And, OK, it hurts some. Little moments where what was until then an 'awareness' that there's somebody journeying to the center of your bones changes to a direct wash of pain as some new level of depth is attained.
But by and large it is just weird and uncomfortable.
And about halfway through, the Physician's Assistant was saying "steak and milk, huh?" in between grunts and grimaces, as she needed to use more and more of her height and strength to get her sample.
And then there are spicules. By the time this issue came up I was a little lost into my own search for peace and open space in my head. But spicules are, I think, little bits from the mess of the marrow-mining process that can be looked at under a microscope in an old-fashioned way to get at least a preliminary sense of the results a day or two before the full tech version.
I will try to put in a gory picture here, but have not had luck with mid-blog photos:
So my back was dug, and then a few hours later I got what officially my last chemo, the LIVE! DIRECT FROM HELL! THIS IS SPINAL TAP!!! Methatrexate. The tap went as well as can be expected, with one strange moment where I felt trills running down my right leg and creating a little dot of extra sensation in my right knee. Very odd. But it passed, and away we go.
And go we did...
