Category: Personal

Um… personal?

Giant Cell Tumor – 9 Months Post-Op

This time around I had to provide x-rays of my lungs as well as the knee, as GCT can metastasize to the lungs.  This proved no small feat, as the facility I go to here in town specializes in orthopedic and decidedly not lungs.  The doc I’ve been seeing from the start – the Doc who diagnosed my tumor – assured me that while they couldn’t evaluate a lung x-ray, they’d be happy to take it.  This is fine, since I send all my x-rays off to the team in Florida who performed my surgery.

Of course this didn’t go as planned.  My normal doc wasn’t in the office the day of my appointment, and everyone else seemed befuddled by the idea that I wanted a lung scan.  An appointment that should have been 10 minutes stretched to over an hour as I refused the knee x-ray without also having the lungs.  Eventually a doc on duty responded to my increasing surliness by actually going through my case notes and discovering that I had indeed been assured they’d do it.

Then, as is par for the course, they send me home with a disc that only held the lung scans – no knee.  Luckily, ever since I had disc lost in the mail I’ve made a point of cutting and ISO before sending them, and this time I noticed the lack of any knee images.  Back up to the office I went to pick up another disc.

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Giant Cell Tumor – 8 Months Post Op

Two days ago was the 8 month mark of my surgery for the tumor in my tibia.  I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that my leg is forever changed from it, and that’s just something to live with.  It gets stiff.  It gets sore.  It randomly hurts.  The nerve deadened area long since stabilized but doesn’t feel as if it has shrunk at all. It feels… delicate. Kneeling on it is a sketchy proposition.  And although I can now bend it nearly as fully as my other leg, doing so feels wrong.  Doing so, things within feel crushed and stretched and at-risk.

Despite the above paragraph, this isn’t a downer update.  I’m leagues from where I’ve been since the surgery.  I still don’t run at all, but I’ve begun mountain biking again.

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Powershell and MP3’s

I’ve been trying in vain to organize my substantial MP3 collection.  I know that in the age of streaming MP3’s are passe, but I just can’t quit ’em.  I listen to a lot of music that isn’t readily available for streaming.

One of the things I’m nitpicky about is Genre tagging.  I like that stuff to be correct.  Thing is, sometimes I get lazy.  So, I dug in to see if I could hack out a quick script to scan subdirectories in my collection and root out MP3’s with incorrect or missing Genre tags. This is a very raw little script with zero error handling.  It examines the first file in every subdir, and writes to an output file every directory where that first file’s genre tag doesn’t match what it should.  It requires taglib-sharp.dll.

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# uses taglib-sharp.dll
[Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFrom("E:\taglib-sharp.dll")

$outfile = "outfile.csv"
$basedir = "I:\SORTED\Classic Rock"
$subdirs = Get-ChildItem $basedir -attributes D

foreach ($subdir in $subdirs) {
$file = Get-ChildItem $subdir.fullname -Filter *.mp3 | Select-Object -First 1
$ff=$file.fullname
$f = [TagLib.File]::Create("$ff")
$genre = $f.Tag.Genres
$outt = "$subdir `t $genre"
$outt
if ($outt -NotMatch 'Classic Rock') {
$outt | out-file $outfile -append
}
$f = ""
}

Giant Cell Tumor – 5 Months Post-Op

Someone coined the term “scanxiety,” and I have it.  Scanxiety is the anxiety that precedes the next x-ray.  It’s a weird, double edged thing.  I’m simultaneously scared and anxious, yet also excited to (hopefully) feel the relief of getting another All Clear from the docs.  Giant cell tumors have an estimated 20% chance of recurrence/growing anew.  Matters are made worse for me since the x-ray is done here locally but then has to be mailed (yes, mailed, because apparently parts of the medical profession are stuck in pre Y2K land) to the surgeons who did the procedure in Florida.

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Giant Cell Tumor – 4 Months Post Op

Today is 4 months to the day of my GCT surgery.  No more official PT for me.  I “graduated,” whatever that means.  To continue my progress I joined a gym for the first time in years.  There I do the various leg machines I had been doing in PT.  I also walk on the treadmill on days where I haven’t been able to go for a walk outside.  I still cannot jog or run, though I make an attempt about once a week.  The muscles are willing – sort of – but the knee can’t yet handle the impact.  This makes the treadmill boring and frustrating.  I used to run at 6.5-7 miles an hour on a treadmill.  Now it takes me half an hour to do 2 miles.  I do pretty well on most of the leg machines, but the one where weight is lifted by the front of the ankle is my nemesis.  25 pounds is too much, and makes the knee hurt.

There are still good days and bad.  Weather continues to effect it dramatically, as does night time.  Some mornings (like this morning) it wakes me up with a persistent aching.  It’s odd where it can hurt.  Some places make sense, but sometimes pain will come from well below the incision.  Perhaps that’s a result of the hardware and screws.  I’m also having trouble with what I’ll call restless leg syndrome.  No matter how tired I am I find that I cannot sit still or find a comfortable position in bed.  It’s frustrating.

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GCT – Giant Cell Tumor – 3 Months Post-Op

Today marks 3 months post op on my tumor.  Random musings follow.

  • I found some GCT support groups on Facebook, but I’m somewhat loathe to recommend them.  Just as when I found support groups for SIBO (another condition I have), I worry that the their memberships are skewed toward more complicated/difficult situations.  This only makes sense, as people who are experiencing protracted complications are far more apt to seek out support communities then are those who’ve had a relatively trouble free experience.  Reading frustrating story after frustrating story can be frightening and, frankly, a bit demoralizing.  I think it’s important to remember whenever joining a group like this that a significant percentage of its population seem to be having a hard time doesn’t necessarily translate into a significant percentage of everyone who has had this condition having a hard time.  Some people get a GCT, get surgery, get better, and move on.  Success stories don’t often join a support group.  They don’t need it. Meanwhile, members of the support group post things like this:Presumably because their experience has been such that, to some degree, their GCT defines them.  This is not a criticism – I totally understand.  However, personally I’m not interested in letting the negative aspects of my life define it.

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Giant Cell Tumor – Nearly 3 Months Post Op

Next Tuesday will officially be 3 months since the surgery for my giant cell tumor took place.  I still have good days and bad days.  Some days I manage a 4.5 mile walk.  Other days I can barely muster 1.5 miles.  While it still hurts every single day, some days are far worse than others.  I “finished” with physical therapy – which doesn’t in any way mean my leg is back to full strength or that my knee is 100%.  It means they’ve given me the tools to continue my rehabilitation on my own.

Random takeaways at this stage of recovery:

  • I’ve struggled with my focus, attention and memory retention quite a bit.  I have a difficult time concentrating and staying on task.  Sometimes I forget words.  I’ve read a few new studies about the affect of anesthesia on the mind and I wonder if that’s the culprit.  I was put under twice for a not insignificant amount of time in the space of two weeks (once for biopsy, once for the procedure) and was on a variety of pain medications for a month if not longer.
  • The hardware they installed is irritating, literally.  I can feel the top and bottom periphery of it.  The top, which covers the site of the tumor, is constantly irritated and tender – much more so with exercise.  I wonder if that will ever subside.
  • I’m able to fully straighten my leg, but still lack 5-7 degrees of bend as compared to my right leg.  Trying to bend it further feels both painful and just plain wrong, like there’s some resistance inside the joint.  Low level swelling is still present, and that may be the culprit.  I’ve been told it can take 6 months to a year for swelling to disappear entirely.
  • I’m frustrated by the fact that between the bone growth around the tumor and the hardware it appears that I may always have a prominent lump below my knee that I will have to be careful and cognizant of:

  • Weather has a profound impact on the joint. We had a few days in the high 50’s/low 60’s, and it felt comparatively wonderful.  We’ve also had days well below freezing, and it would feel as if it didn’t want to bend at all.
  • While I’m sleeping far longer than I had been, it still wakes me aching every morning without fail.  I often don’t feel properly rested regardless of how long I’ve slept, and and any extended exertion wears me out.  I still tend to be in bed between 8:30-9:00 every night (for proper perspective, I wake at 5:30 AM for work).
  • Remaining in any position for too long is a recipe for pain.  Sitting, standing, laying down, whatever.  If it isn’t allowed to bend or move for any period of time it begins to ache.

I miss running and biking, but I also know that to attempt either is a recipe for disaster.  Running in particular would be impossible.  I’ve tried a light jog.  The impact causes pain and the joint feels utterly unreliable.

The good news is, despite the challenges, I continue to improve.  The day of my PT discharge one of the staff told me they thought my surgery had been in October, not December.  That, I suppose, is a testament to my recovery.  While I don’t pretend to be at all versed in joint replacement, some doctors and therapists have said they consider this to be more debilitating and difficult to recover from than knee replacement.  I’ve been told the tibia bears the brunt of your body’s weight far more than your femur, so it being compromised – fairly significantly in the case of my not-at-all small tumor – is profoundly impacting.  I have no idea if this is true or not.

I’m posting all of this online, rather than in my private journal, because when I started researching after having been diagnosed I just didn’t find much out there to help me understand what I was in for.  I hope that other people diagnosed with giant cell tumors will discover these posts and find them helpful.

Postoperative Neuropathy

Postoperative Neuropathy – I has it.  There’s a large roving dead spot of no feeling in my lower leg since the surgery.  surrounding it, and radiating out, are patches of hypersensitivity.  Anything against these patches, even something as thin as a bed sheet, feels like rubbing sandpaper over a freshly skinned knee.  It makes wearing pants, and long johns (kind of a necessity here right now) annoying, and it makes sleep nearly impossible.

It seems to be the worst at night.  Right now I estimate I’m getting 2 hours or less of sleep at each go before waking up.  Sometimes it’s the knee waking me up, as I can easily irritate it changing positions in my sleep, but most often it’s this nerve pain.  Once awake it’s difficult to go back to sleep.  On a typical night I’m in bed by 9, but not asleep until midnight or later.  Then I’m waking up at least once around 2. If I’m able to fall back asleep I reawaken around 4.  Usually that’s it for me, and I just get up.  This morning, for the first time, I was able to fall back asleep around 4:30 and my alarm woke me at my usual 5:30 time.

I’m trying different methods to combat all this.  I’ve had chamomile tea and taken valerian and other supposedly sleep inducing herbs.  I’m loathe to take a prescription drug, as I’m finally off of the ridiculous number I was on post-op.  Last night I tried  a compression sock over the leg, thinking that maybe having something on it that isn’t moving around causing irritation might help.  It seemed to, at least a little, though this morning my foot hurts.  I may have to cut the toe out of one of the compression socks and see if that helps.

It’s all very frustrating, as it’s severely effecting my focus, attention and motivation during the day.  I’m not only constantly in varying levels of pain, I’m also always tired.

There’s no doubt that they cut through some nerves during the procedure.  They also moved some around – out of the way – during it.  There’s also still plenty of inflammation going on.  My hope is that this will all improve over time.

Giant Cell Tumor

It all began with an achy left knee. It ached for years, really. Then, summer before last, I took a healthy spill while mountain biking and hit it but good on some partially buried lava rocks. After that it really was never the same, and I assumed that I’d done some sort of ligament damage to it.

By November of 2017 it was troublesome enough to keep me from playing soccer with my son. Kicking the ball, especially on the inside of my foot, would set off an advanced ache that would last for days. It was at this point that my wife insisted I have it looked at. I told the ortho that I was sure I’d damaged some ligaments. An x-ray was performed. Much to my surprise my ligaments looked fine. What was concerning was a definite large lump of bone in the top of my tibia. The doctor said it could be a tumor. An MRI was performed. My wife said those damned doctors always go for the worst case scenario, so surely it wasn’t a tumor.

The following week the doctor was running late for my return appointment to discuss the MRI. Very late. Rather than reschedule me, they shuffled me into an examination room to wait in private. About a half hour later, when the doctor still hadn’t arrived and the nurses were continuing to check in on me and assure me I should wait, I knew it had to be a tumor. They wouldn’t keep me for anything they weren’t concerned about.

When the doc finally swept in the room I said, in my most Ahnuld accent, “It’s a toomah!” He didn’t crack a smile. Instead, he rolled the computer monitor my way and presented this:

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