A friend told me that the recovery path post-surgery is not a linear one. When she told me that, I assumed she meant how I would feel physically. So when I was still feeling pretty good around 5 days post-surgery, I started to think maybe I had been really lucky. I had moved to just taking Advil and Tylenol pretty quickly and I was able to move much better than I expected. I walked quite a bit and it felt really good to get outside.
Then the leg pain began. Yeah, legs. Nowhere near my surgery site. It reminded me a lot of the bone pain I experienced during chemo. It was an intense, deep, dull ache. This was more intense than the chemo bone pain.
Of course, none of the nurses or doctors have heard of this kind of thing happening post-surgery before. My oncologist thinks it’s unlikely that it’s still a side effect of chemo. It’s been too long since I finished.
I ended up going to the ED to get some tests. The good news is that all the labs and tests looked good. Totally normal. So we could rule out all the “scary stuff” like cancer in my bones or a blood clot. The current theory is that I was having a bad reaction to the antibiotic I was taking.
A few days after stopping the antibiotic, the bone pain is gone. I’m now really sore in the muscles in my legs and torso from compensating for the pain. The muscle pain feels different and hopefully will subside soon. It has been a rollercoaster of a week.
The final pathology report came back.
It looked mostly good, with a couple of outstanding questions. The pathology report showed a significant response to chemo. The original tumor and satellite spots had reduced significantly.