Tag: Nausea

Kidney Stones: Like I Needed That, Too

File this under, “lucky me”.

Well, I started experiencing nausea with no discernable cause last week. Wasn’t too bad and I assumed it was, I dunno, just my body being weird. Or maybe the pack of raw sugar snap peas that I had eaten the day before.

But the next day I woke up with middle back pain. I assumed that it was due to a new strength training workout that is known for evoking muscle soreness, and I figured that I’d just overdone it.

The nausea got worse, the backpain didn’t abate.

After a few days of this I decided to make an appoinment to get it checked out. This was partly because Dr. Google suggested that this could be an issue with my gall bladder or a kidney stone. I waved the gall bladder possibility off because the symptoms didn’t seem to match…but the kidney stones? Kind of ridiculous, I thought. I regularly drank a lot of water, ate limited processed food, was a vegetarian…you get the gist. I didn’t think I had the most common risk factors for it.

Then again, I didn’t have the most common risk factors for breast cancer either.

My nurse practitioner listened to my complaints and pronounced the most likely diagnosis: kidney stones.

I just don’t get it.

Why do these things happen?

This…is not gonna be fun.
(Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash)

After trying to live an exemplary life diet and exercise-wise, breastfeeding my kids and whatnot, seven years ago I got cancer. That’s one of the most terrifying diagnoses you can get.

I did not enjoy treatment. But eventually I got through it and learned to deal with the uncertainties that cancer brings.

Now, I may have a kidney stone. A “more painful than childbirth” kidney stone, which people that I’ve told like to point out is *ahem* very painful. Exceptionally painful. Severely painful. Hello, these reminders don’t help.

On the bright side, this probably won’t kill me. I’ll only wish that I were dead.

I was already thinking about how ridiculously unfortunate it was that the stressors I’m currently dealing with were taking place all at once (that’s another story that I won’t bore you with). I was not asking for yet another one.

And it gets even worse: I was given the opportunity to teach yoga to cancer survivors in about a month, something that I was so excited about! It was such an amazing chance to do exactly the thing for which I become a registered yoga teacher.

By the way, the average time for a kidney stone to pass is, you guessed it, a month. (To be fair, I’ve also heard anywhere from 1 to 6 weeks, so it kind of depends whom you ask). The timing just sucks.

I learned that the main protein sources for vegetarians are very high in oxalates, which are some of the most likely culprits in the formation of kidney stones. As a matter of fact, so much healthy food (dark leafy greens, for example) is actually high in oxalates, with spinach being number one. Who was eating spinach almost daily? Right here, me!

In the meantime, conflicting information on the internet about what I should be eating is stressful because I feel like I’m making things worse every time I put food in my mouth. My main staples are coming up as no-nos.

So what am I going to do? Try not to catastrophize. My mind is my worst enemy and comes up with all kinds of unpleasant possibilities as I wait for urine test results and probably a CT scan.

I’m going to ride this out the best that I can. That means keep practice teaching for my yoga class and consider this another test of how well I can prevent my scary thoughts from dragging me down a frightening rabbit hole.

Update when I know more.

Addendum to Anxiety

I am just coming off a bout of particularly intense anxiety, so this is a good time to write an addendum to my last post. This episode of anxiety was striking in its intensity, hit me much harder than I expected and took a lot more out of me. The trigger was something that happened to someone I love, so I had no control over it but felt all the emotional pain.

It’s now been almost a week. Intellectually I’m over it but its physical effects linger and threaten to pull me back in. This is a change from the past because I used to be able to shake these feelings more easily. Now anxiety casts a long shadow that remains after the worst has passed. I get flashes of the stressful event and I re-experience that despair.

As it did with my cancer diagnosis, my weight plummeted over the past week. The reason: my reaction to anxiety is in the gut and intestines. A cold, tight, miserable feeling — emotional pain made physical. As days go by and things seem to fall back into place, meditation grounds me and staying mindful keeps me focused on the “now” and not ruminating on what has happened. But while I can calm myself, the physical effects of the nausea hold on. 

That nausea, then, serves as a reminder of the event and re-triggers the anxiety. In times of distress I fear eating because the nausea is even worse with food in my stomach. But not eating weakens me and increases the sense of agony. This transitions into a depression of sorts. Quite simply, at this point I can’t win.

What causes even more anxiety is the link between stress and inflammation, and thereby inflammation and cancer. While I’ve been assured that it’s not the case, there’s a part of me that still implicates stress in the proliferation of my cancer. 

As my weight drops I am reminded of that same fear I felt after my diagnosis, that the drop in weight would worsen my outcome because I still had to go through chemo and its effects. So all that fear is concentrated and deep in meaning. One event triggers multiple memories.

This seems like an impossible situation. Anxiety brings worries of cancer, which cause more anxiety. I’m afraid of being afraid. Doesn’t that sound ridiculous?

The cycle runs its course as time passes. The intensity fades. Slowly I regain my emotional footing, but I’m still attached to the expectations I had before the event that triggered this anxiety. Those expectations will eventually transition into a new reality, but until I am truly able to practice non-attachment, I am destined to repeat this.

Chemotherapy Dreamin’

This is going to sound very strange. In fact, it seems bizarre to me as I’m writing it. But there are parts of chemotherapy that I miss.

So this deserves some clarification: chemo was absolutely miserable and by far the worst part of cancer treatment. When I entered the infusion room, I knew that I’d be out of commission for the next week. I’d feel nauseated with a burning throughout my GI tract and be laid out as if I’d been hit by a locomotive. I could.not.wait for chemo to end.

What changed my opinion? You may think this sounds crazy, but hear me out. The sad fact was, chemo was the only guaranteed way that I could get some rest.

I knew I wasn’t going to handle work issues, clean the apartment, pick up the kids or do anything else that I’m usually expected to do. It was a forced convalescence. One that I desperately needed.

When I was going through cancer treatment, I didn’t worry about the little things. And truly, when you have cancer, everything else seems inconsequential. When you’re wondering whether you’ll live to see your kids graduate from high school, nothing matters as much as survival.

It wasn’t until I finished all my treatments and my hair had grown back that the “little things” started to creep back and set up residence again. Memories of the misery of chemo lose their clarity, the fear of death passes. The overwhelm from a diagnosis is replaced by the more familiar overwhelm of daily stressors, now made worse by the additional complication of chemo brain. No, they’re not life-threatening, but they are all-absorbing.

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I’m gonna lie down and close my eyes for just a sec…

So is it surprising that I wish I could close my eyes and be left alone for a week? Even more so, isn’t it sad that it took cancer for me to be allowed to rest and let others take care of things for a while?

That, I believe, was a warning that my life needed to change and is now the major driving force in my meditation practice.

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Consider: Because my cancer treatment lasted over a year, it became the “familiar”. The “unknown” is what follows, and that includes the threat of recurrence. That’s when things really get scary. Learning to deal with that will literally take the rest of my life.

Addendum to So.Many.Pills

My last post (I Didn’t Expect THAT: So.Many.Pills) was about the overwhelming number of medications associated with cancer treatment, particularly for someone not used to taking pills. But this topic deserves a closer look…

If I had to choose one of the most frightening aspects of cancer treatment, it would be side effects. This is not like popping an aspirin for a headache. These are medications that can take a heavy toll. One of my greatest sources of anxiety was deciding whether to take a pill or try to “tough it out”.

After surgery, I was given a generic form of something approximating Norco. Some people jokingly commented that this was a “perk” of treatment, but I had read the insert that came with the medication and wanted nothing to do with it. The only reason that I took it (a single half dose) was that by the evening I had a horrible headache, more painful than anything at the surgery site and probably due to a combination of the anesthesia and not being able to drink coffee that morning.

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Just…no.

It was a miserable night, since the half dose didn’t do much and I tossed in bed, googling interactions between my pill and ibuprofin, which is what I really wanted to take but hadn’t due to potential bleeding issues. At about 5am, satisfied that enough time had passed from my half dose of pain reliever, I took the ibuprofin and finally got some sleep. Wish I’d taken it first instead of the “oooo-you’re-so-lucky” Norco.

Nausea from chemo was another terrifying thought. The nurses had warned me not to risk it; if I started to feel queasy, take anti-nausea meds. Once vomiting sets in, I was told, it was hard to stop. Of course, the side effects associated with the meds were rather extensive and just reading the label made me anxious. There were two different meds and the idea was this: take the first one (ondonsetron) and then if I need a booster in four hours, take the second one (prochlorperazine). And then alternate like that every four hours, if necessary.

Sounds reasonable, except that a couple of nights after my first infusion I mixed up the pills and ended up taking prochlorperazine first. Prochlorperazine is an anti-psychotic (I guess, with anti-nausea properties?) and it was responsible for one of the roughest nights of my life. It was that night that I swore I’d pierced the veil between this world and the next and decided that death was a fair alternative to what I was feeling.

Somehow, I survived those first nights, but I wasn’t keen to go through that again.

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Not a perfect solution, but better than the alternatives.

I live in a state that has legalized cannabis, and was sent a shipment of CBD cookies by one of my brothers who had used them to control nausea from migraines. I was encouraged to try them since I was told CBD didn’t have side effects. Of course, as I mentioned in the previous post, it also didn’t have clear dosing guidelines. I mean, this was a crumbly cookie – how do you dose that? My brother said something like, “I take a couple when I get a migraine.” My brother is also 6’3″. I figured I’d start with one.

Shortly after that, I fell into a weird sleep from which, an hour later, I woke with a gasp because I thought I’d stopped breathing. Mmmm, probably not the right dose for me. Four hours after I’d consumed the cookie I needed to pick up my son from school. I wasn’t high, of course, but I wasn’t feeling normal either. I made it there and back alive. It was at that point that I realized having to play mom while going through cancer treatment just plain sucked, but I digress…

Eventually I worked out a dose, about 1/5 to 1/4 of a cookie, which was 20-25 mg of CBD. This was a game-changer for me and I gratefully relied on CBD for the remainder of my treatment. Yes, I truly disliked the taste, and with the lining of my GI tract gone, eating a cookie was not first on my list but being able to calm my nausea without side effects was well worth it. It probably helped my anxiety too.

What it would have been like to go through treatment without being so fearful of what the medications were doing to me? Anxiety always got the best of me. As noted in my last post, getting to the point where I could limit the number of medications I took was key in helping me get through this experience.

While the physical effects were rough, the psychological effects were what magnified the discomfort, and that had to do with feeling so far out of my element. None of this was close to normal. Of course, my normal is not needing medications. That wasn’t happening with cancer, but once I figured out what was what and how much I could handle, treatment became more manageable.