Spinal Tap # 9

They take no time in knocking you down man. When I came in on Monday, I was running around, even working out a little bit, because I literally do everything in my power while I'm here to not lose strength. Whatever you lose, you have to rebuild and that takes a lot of time and effort. Mon and Tues were good then (minus the disrupted sleep, but that's a given being here).

On Wed, I had a spinal tap which is basically when they insert a needle into your spinal column to obtain a sample of the spinal fluid to check and make sure that the disease has not crossed that barrier. Thank god, so far, that test has always been negative for me. It would've been very messy otherwise, involving chemo treatments to spinal column, which they gave me as a preventative measure anyway every time they have done a spinal tap. They usually put in Methotrexate in my spine, so same thing was done yesterday. If everything goes well from now on, I think this might just have been the last spinal tap procedure....(but that's also what I thought two years ago and was clearly wrong, so I guess of all the people in this world, a cancer patient should really never say never.)

The procedure itself is probably about 20-30 minutes, depending on how slow/fast the doctor is. I had a pretty slow one yesterday, but his technique wasn't bad. That's what it all comes down to with things like these - if they don't do it right, they're probably gonna have to do it again...the last thing you want is to be getting that needle jammed into your spine twice. It's not a little poke either, they go all the way into the center of your spine:

http://www.headache-treatment-options.com/spinal-headache.html

You have to lay on your stomach, the doctor rubs some beta-dine in your back, inserts a little needle with the numbing medicine, and then finally the actual needle that collects the sample and is also used to put in chemo with. That needle stays in for about 10 minutes or so (unless if the doctor is fast) and he sort of pushes it deeper into the spinal canal until he finds a good spot and then we pretty much stay there. I'm usually sweating a lot by this time due to the combination of pain, nerves and anticipation of the moment they'll take the damn thing out. A lot of doctors try to make conversation when doing this to make the patient feel better, which recently started working for me, but the first 4-5 of these, I didn't feel like talking during it. It was actually pretty annoying, because I felt like he was trying so hard to distract me, when I preferred to focus on the pain for some odd reason. The change in that outlook probably came from the fact that I'm a pro at these by now. I mean you have 9 of these and even the pain is not so scary anymore.

After he takes out the spinal fluid, he puts in the chemo fluids and we're done. They tell me I have to lay flat on my back for about 8 hours or so, or as long as possible, or else I would get nasty headaches from the disruption of the spinal fluid created by the entrance of the needle and the removal of some of the fluid itself. I've had these during the first round of treatment, but not because I couldn't lay flat for that long, but because I had to get up and pee. They have you on so much fluid that the longest you can ever hold it is about 1.5 hours. Even that takes a lot of patience. Also, it's bad for your kidneys while on chemo to not pee often. There's always that trade-off on the spinal tap days and you kinda just hope you get lucky and don't get the headache from hell because you got up to pee.

The absolute worst part of going down to the Radiology area to get this procedure done is seeing little kids, even little babies being brought into one of those rooms and screaming in pain...I don't know how those parents see their kids go through it. Breaks my heart every time.