Too long of a day

The bone scan was pretty uneventful today. The way a bone scan works is they inject you with a radioactive tracer that settles in bones. You go away, drink a ton of water or juice, and come back after two or three hours. Then they run what is basically a huge Geiger counter over you to get an image of how the tracer is taken up. Mets can appear as either more or less take-up of the tracer.

The only part I didn't like today was that the tracer really hurt when it was injected. They have to use my right arm, and I had eight rounds of chemo in that vein back in 2000-2001 so that vein is really scarred up. The needle they use to do the injection is pretty big, too (they can use a smaller needle to draw blood). I can't have anything injected into my left arm because it's already got mild lymphedema. The injection doesn't usually hurt, though - today was an anomaly - and the scan itself is painless.

So anyways, the scan went ok. I don't know if they saw anything. They did do close-up scans of my sternum to compare against the last time and my leg since it's the area of concern this time. I also had an xray done of my pelvis and leg. From a distance, the xrays looked normal, but I guess that doesn't mean anything. I don't know when I'll get my results. My fear now is that the scans won't show anything, and they'll think that I'm crying wolf. I'm quite sure that the pain exists and that it's in the bone.... but there is always a doubtful voice in me that says "There's nothing really wrong with me. It's all in my head. I'm making this up." I guess I'm worried that my pain won't be validated. Yeah, I know, it's silly, but there it is.

This evening we watched The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (the original). It is clearly a groundbreaking slasher film, and I can see how people might have found it scary at the time. The soundtrack is certainly scary. Seen today, however, it's less scary. The acting was less sure in the original, I think. I think I liked the remake better. I also thought that House of 1000 Corpses, which has a similar storyline, was much, much scarier - not to mention gorier, but even without the gore it would be a very scary film. We'd hoped to watch The Descent as well tonight, but since Ian's currently watching the documentary of the making of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre", we'll watch the other movie tomorrow.

I'm still feeling awful. I feel like I've been run over by a truck - everything takes up too much energy. Even the thought of having to go upstairs and sort laundry is overwhelming. My eyes are slowly getting better, but the one is still quite red and they're both itchy (no, I haven't been scratching at them). I just want to crawl into bed and sleep. I've made Ian promise not to wake me tomorrow - he usually gets me up around 12:30pm if I don't get up before them - because I just need to sleep. I remember I used to end up feeling this way about once or twice a year, and the only "cure" was to sleep almost non-stop for a couple of days. I'm looking forward to not having to do anything at all this weekend.