A Nauseous New Year

The first week of the new year has been an uncomfortable one. I'll recapitulate my symptoms, described in the previous post, one more time here:

1) Decreased hearing in my affected ear. After surgery it had improved markedly, but now, after gamma knife, it seems to have deteriorated to a point where it is worse than it was before surgery.

2) Dis-equilibrium, or a loss of balance. Not really dizziness, but walking like a drunk person. The best way I have heard this described is a "loss of sure-footedness". Last Monday I joined my mom and an aunt to see a screening of "Mano Po 6". Inside the darkened theater, I really thought I might not make it to my seat. Made me promise myself never to grow impatient when walking behind any slow-moving person (although I still reserve my right to overtake them. If I can, that is...)

3) Nausea. This one causes the most misery, and is probably directly related to #2. With dis-equilibrium, I basically spent the entire day in a state similar to standing on a rowboat rocking in the river, thus resulting in significant nausea.

4) More jiggly eyeballs. Now unable to read a book inside a moving vehicle. All my life, I have been able to read inside cars, boats, trains, any moving vehicle. Now I have a very difficult time doing so.

5) The midnight sleep-shattering headaches are gone (thankfully), but I still wake up in the mornings to a mild, vague headache which disappears soon after I stand up.

At first I had very little apprehension over these symptoms, because it all made sense. If the tumor is swelling (remember the goon who got beat up by FPJ?) , then it is getting temporarily larger and causing the same "irritations" to the neural structures as it was when it was first growing. So it makes sense that I will have to go through a period of experiencing, once again, the symptoms of untreated ANs. It even makes sense that these symptoms will be more pronounced now, since the tumor is probably swelling up faster than it was growing naturally back when it was alive and well. For instance, if in the month following gamma knife my tumor swelled by 10%, then this would mean that my 3cm tumor "grew" by about 3mm in the past month. This is equivalent to a full year's growth of a "healthy" or "evil" AN.

Still, yesterday I was feeling so miserable that I googled "stomach cancer" and "hydrocephalus". Crap. Same symptoms for hydrocephalus. Panic mode.

Went to see Dr. Mercado today. Got assurance that there was no apparent hydrocephalus causing these symptoms. And it was almost a sure thing that these are being caused by a swelling tumor. The scientific term is "pseudo-progression" meaning that the tumor is behaving like it's growing but it's actually just swelling up getting ready to die. In my honest opinion, as with many medical terms, pseudo-progression is a bit of a misnomer, because there is nothing "pseudo" about the tumor getting bigger. It is really getting bigger and causing very very real symptoms. But I guess maybe the word "progression" is meant to convey "living growth". This is not "living growth" but "swelling at the gates of death".

To regulate the swelling and manage the symptoms, I was prescribed a week of oral steroids, and weekly check-ups, just to be sure.

Overall, this is all fairly good news. We're on track. Dr. Mercado even pointed out that these pronounced symptoms actually hide a piece of good news, that the tumor was truly hit by the gamma knife. Napuruhan, as FPJ might have put it.

Still, this week of musing did leave me with one sobering thought: the tumor does not immediately die after being shot by the gamma knife. It will fully die only after 12 months or so. Using the same logic, it will also take more than 12 months or so before we are fully 100% sure that the gamma knife did not hit anything else. Anything healthy I mean, like the cranial nerves, the cerebellum, the brain stem, etc. This will be long after we all think I am fully recovered. Pray for me.