Spent nine hours at the doctor yesterday. Spent a few hours at my oncology clinic and spent a few at the ER. During those hours they filled me with lots of fluids, lots of drugs, did lots of tests, and sent me home feeling much better than when I had started…and within two minutes of being home–after not throwing up for nine hours–I spewed into a metal bowl while laying in my bed. That always happens doesn’t it? Ugh, I hate that! But here’s the story of what’s going on.

For eight days I’ve been sick with debilitating headaches and nausea. Essentially for those eight days, every morning I’d wake up with a pounding headache. If I stayed on my back it wouldn’t hurt so bad, if I stood up the pounding would be so intense that I’d have to hold onto a wall to keep from falling to the ground. The first few days of being sick we found that the symptoms would begin to disappear close to one or two in the afternoon. But as the days went by the symptoms began to last longer as they also increased in severity. The nausea turned to vomiting and the headaches started to last all day and eventually all night.

That’s when we called my oncology clinic to get some help. They suggested that much of what I was experiencing was from dehydration, so they called me in for fluids.

Simultaneously as all this is happening I also went into the urologist because of my chronic UTI’s. And it turns out, wonderfully*, that when I urinate I am not fully clearing my bladder. This is bad news ’cause essentially this left over urine is a breeding ground for infection and cannot be allowed to stay. The solution? Straight Cathing. Or to say more clearly: learning to drain my own bladder two or three times a day by inserting in a catheter, draining what’s in there, and then ripping it out. Two or three times a day. Self Catheterizing. Ugh. The good news is that I talked the urologist into giving me two weeks to see if I couldn’t ‘figure it out’. He reassured me that there’s nothing you can do if your bladders not working and I reassured him that I’d still like the opportunity to get it fixed. So I was essentially given two weeks to learn to clear.

Ok, back to being sick. The fluids helped with the nausea but they didn’t touch the headaches. At all. So they sent me to the ER to get my head scanned.

At the ER, to make a long story short, my head scan came back clear (insert celebratory remarks here!) which still left us wondering why I was having headaches. My bladder issues got worse leaving us no choice but to do a straight cath to drain it in hopes that my bladder will start up working again. In the end the ER gave me a few new drugs to try and we decided to go back on the ‘roids in hopes that the reason my head hurts and the reason my bladder is digressing is because there is inflammation in my spine that the steroids were reducing and that is now (now that I’ve been steroid free for a few weeks) putting pressure on the nerves going to those areas.

So where I’m left now is with the blessing of celebrating a cancer free brain while grieving the loss of about a week and half with my kids, my wife, and my community. We’re still not completely sure why I’ve been getting headaches and we’re still not completely sure if my bladder is fixable or not.** Regardless, here I am, up early on a Saturday morning with only a tiny little hint of a headache and no nausea. Here’s hopin’ that today’s a new day of health and healing.

* Please note the sarcasm here

** I have not taken the time here to share the different things we’re doing to get my bladder working again. If you have advice or insight into this we’ll gladly receive it, but more often than not people share it under the assumption that we’re not doing anything beyond what’s been typed or shared. So please know this isn’t the case.