More tales from Cancerworld

Greetings from my moderately appointed semi-private room in lovely Princess Margaret Hospital, which promises to be my home for quite a few days to come.

I was quite frustrated after seeing Dr. Lee on Monday. On Wednesday my brother got through to the orthopedic surgeon's secretary, who had not yet heard my Monday and Tuesday phone messages (she was working her way through the holiday overload). She said Dr. Second was booking patients in March. I told her it was an emergency, and she said I should go to the ER. I told her I had done that a week before, without any resolution, and that Dr. Lee wanted me to see him. Then I needed a referral letter from her, she insisted. Finally, she agreed to accept a copy of my last CT report and a letter, which had to be faxed, not scanned and emailed, and she would see what she could do. So my brother, bless his heart, went out and faxed same, picking up a commode for me on the way home, which he installed in my front room, and not a moment too soon because I could not make the stairs any longer.

I called Dr. Lee's office and left a message asking her to help me get something happening. Thursday morning at 7:30 a.m. -- an hour after I finally got to sleep (backache keeps me up all night, and for the first time my left leg wasn't just jumping, it was contracting in a weird, uncontrollable spasm about every 15 seconds) -- her secretary called to say they had sent copies of my scans over to both Dr. Second, who's at another hospital, and my radiation oncologist, whom I'll call Dr. Noguff, who is at a third hospital.

Somewhere in there Dr. Noguff called me, to my surprise, and said she'd heard from Dr. Lee and neither of them thought this was a cancerous lesion pressing on my spinal cord, but she agreed that I needed to see the orthopod as soon as possible. I told her I wasn't having much luck, and did a little weeping about having to be my own family doctor, which she seemed to take up as a challenge. She said she'd track him down. "Good luck," I told her.

Meanwhile, I called Dr. Second's office to make sure they'd received the fax; the upshot was they called back soon after and agreed he'd see me on Monday morning.

I was supposed to go to an appointment with a counsellor at Wellspring cancer centre at 3 p.m., and Liz volunteered to drive me. Up until that point, I had been able, with help, to negotiate the two sets of steps in front of my house. This time, it was a bit of a comedy. Poor Liz tried to scoot around me as I held on to the door frame and the railings, so she could help me down, and suddenly my leg gave out and I landed on my bum with a thud. Liz gamely turned me around and tried to lift me up so I could make it back inside the house. But my leg gave out again and I fell forward and banged my shin and knee (have some lovely bruises today, though it didn't hurt much).

A stranger passing by on the street volunteered to help, and he and Liz managed to carry me bodily back into the house. "You're obviously not leaving here except on a stretcher," said Liz, and I had to agree.

When I called to cancel with my counsellor, she told me to get to emergency as fast as I could go. All I could think to do was call 911, but when the paramedics arrived, they were only allowed to take me to Mount Sinai, which would have meant starting from scratch since my doctors are all at other hospitals. They explained about private ambulances, which I knew little about but which are cheaper though less well-staffed and will take you anywhere you want to go. So I decided to postpone going to the ER.

Finally, Dr. Noguff called at 6:30 p.m. and told me she'd exchanged emails with the elusive Dr. Second and he thought I should have an MRI. He has been saying for the past year that he could get useful information from an MRI, while Dr. Lee and others have insisted an MRI was impossible because of the metal in my back. (One nurse practitioner said that it would kill me!). I told Dr. Lee about Dr. Second's opinion many times, but no MRI has ever been done -- and no CT scan of my mid-back has been done in nearly a year.

Dr. Noguff asked me to come in the next morning (this morning) at 10 a.m. and she would look at my scans (which Liz kindly picked up for me at the other hospital) and then try to get me an MRI. She said I could go to emerg if I wanted to, but I probably wouldn't get an MRI any faster in the middle of the night. I arranged a private ambulance. My mother arrived from Kitchener in the middle of all of this.

I was so thrilled that, finally, one of my oncologists was getting serious about conferring with the orthopedic surgeon. Everything has seemed so fragmented up till now. At last things seemed to be moving along. Meanwhile, the spasms and lack of sensation in my left foot were moving up my calf, and when Diane tried to take me up the stairs in hope of having a bath, my leg just kept scooting out from under me like it was made of straw, and I almost killed both of us.

That's a long enough post for now. Will tell today's tale soon.