Moving Forward, Buying Time
“My doctors were pretty much unanimous in urging me to wait on radiating my spine. They didn't want to make things worse for me by trying a procedure that could, I guess, do as much harm as good.”
Vertebroplasty. Not the easiest word to say, and not one that I had heard until recently. But, in about two weeks, I'm going to have one. For the last several weeks, I've been trying to figure out what to do about the tumors in my spine. In particular, the largest one that has weakened one vertebra to the point that my doctors are worried about a fracture. My doctors were pretty much unanimous in urging me to wait on radiating my spine. They didn't want to make things worse for me by trying a procedure that could, I guess, do as much harm as good.
So now I'm scheduling a vertebroplasty. What they do is inject hot glue or cement directly into the bone of the vertebra that has been compromised. The glue strengthens the bone so that it won't collapse. But wait, there's more! (I know, that sounded like a late-night infomercial but it seemed like the right line.)
The glue will at least partially seal in the tumor and cut off some of the veins that feed it. Hopefully that will hold it in place for a while. And there's still more. The glue is hot when it goes in and is expected to kill some of the cancer cells. This is done in one day; I don't think I even have to overnight in the hospital.
And there's one more benefit too. My doctors noticed that one of my vertebrae, one not affected by cancer, also shows some early signs of weakness and possible fracture. That's just from normal wear and tear. So while they're fixing the one with cancer, they'll fix this other one too. Who could resist a deal like that? It's actually pretty amazing that they can do this, and it should at least buy me some time.
I do wonder how they come up with these procedures though. Were they all sitting around one day and someone said, "I know, we'll just shoot some glue in, that should do it"? Whoever thought it up, I am grateful.
About the same time, I'll have one more radio-frequency ablation procedure to clean up my lung, and something else I hadn't heard of: cryoablation. They're going to freeze the part of my rib where the cancer cells have started to grow, in order to kill them.
That will still leave the four other tumors on my spine but we'll get to them later. Right now I'm glad that we're moving ahead, at least a little. And I'm glad that this is a written blog today so that I don't have to say "vertebroplasty" on the radio. I'm not sure I could get past that one.
7:03 AM ET | 07-17-2007 | permalink
