A pain in the shoulder...

Well, it's a sleepless night, not due to the dex.

I played an atypically bad round of golf on my last day off for the holidays. I made the mistake of taking a few lessons from a golf pro and he ruined about three years of work. I'm not happy. If I spent as much time, money and effort at ANYTHING as I do at golf, I would be so good at whatever activity that is by now...

More troubling, though, is the dull pain in my left shoulder. I recall that it was a sharp pain in my left shoulder that was my first sign that anything was wrong with me, back in October of 2008. There is something going on on the shoulder...nothing all that painful but there's something there, and it doesn't feel like muscle. It feels like bone.

Add to this that I'm still in limbo as to the last immunofixation test and it makes for a restless evening.

I'm (almost) certain that I'm still at zero M protein, and that I'm still in complete remission, and that whatever discomfort I feel is simply because the bone hasn't healed 100% yet. And yet it's a reminder that all is still not completely well.

I hope it goes away -- because if it doesn't, I know that I'll be in for fine needle aspirations and other PET down in Arkansas, even if it's just to prove a point that there's nothing there. The MRI might show that it's gone (in which case I don't know what I'm feeling) but if it doesn't, it won't show avidity in the lesion (i.e. are there cancer cells "doing the Watusi" as BJ once said). We need another PET for that.

Anyhow, in a few hours when they open, I will call GD's office and tell him I want my GD test results, and we'll take it from there.

In other news, I spoke this evening with a nice young woman from South Carolina whose father was recently diagnosed. I'm trying to toe the line between being an impartial advisor/resource and being an evangelist for Arkansas, but the most important thing is this is another example of the usefulness of this blog and I'm so appreciative of the opportunity to talk with newly diagnosed patients to help them navigate their choices.

Happy New Year to you all...I will get to those lab results this week as they are pretty interesting.