Friday, Jan 26, 2018

Thoughts on incontinence.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I experienced my third bout of incontinence in 2017, after spine surgery and having a catheter in and out for the month of August.

After surgery my first efforts at recovery involved a lot of walking. After a while (it seemed like forever to me) my surgeon agreed to physical therapy for my back, which was very stiff. When that was completed my back felt much better and I then concentrated on incontinence.

I started physical therapy for incontinence in late November and while I am still not 100% continent, I am much improved.

2018 will be a year where I continued to work on my back and my bladder. I will continue to walk, do stretching and strengthening exercises, and do my Kegels as instructed by my therapist.

I'm not a patient person by nature. My surgeon says my back won't be fully healed for another year and a half. My urology therapist says it will be months before I'm fully continent. The important thing is to keep at it - what other choice do I have?

January 26, 2018

Thoughts on XTANDI.

I started taking XTANDI (Enzalutamide) in late August. When I first met with my oncologist after taking XTANDI, I was claiming that I didn't notice any side effects. But shortly after that, I experienced hot flashes again (they had stopped after having Lupron injections for a while). I then started  having bouts of fatigue where I was napping for two or three hours a day. Then my sense of taste was affected - most noticeably Dunkin Donuts Coffee tasted really bad - so much so that I couldn't drink it. But all of these side effects ended or greatly reduced after a while.

The fourth side effect I noticed was a pain in my upper thigh, close to my hip. It really hurt when I got up after sitting for a while, and would ease off after I loosened up. Common sense
told me it was muscular, and my oncologist verified that it sounded like a side effect of XTANDI, but deep down I was worried about a reoccurrence of cancer.

I asked my oncologist the leg pain could go away - just as the other side effects had. This was on a Monday (he said yes). By Wednesday morning the pain had disappeared (after a month). So I guess I need to be patient if I experience more XTANDI.side effects. I also need to talk to my doctors and/or nurses when I notice some weird symptoms rather than assume that my cancer is back.