Syzdekistan

On Monday, I got up assuming I would be getting a call from a home health care nurse to continue my injections of filgrastim. It took a while and call to the marrow donation coordinator, but I finally got a call from her around lunch time and she said she would come to my office to give me the shots. We took over a conference room and she gave me three shots of filgrastim in my stomach. She also took a detailed history and catalogued my growing aches and pains. By the time she came around, I was feeling pretty sore. I was experiencing pretty severe lower back pain as the proliferating marrow filled the spaces in the bones of my pelvis. I had a bit of a headache and very strange ache in my sternum that felt like someone punched me. But, by far, the worst was my back.

I had gone to work knowing that I have a bottle of Tylenol rattling around in my car. When I went to take some, the pills had shed their outer coating and didn’t look very safe. Furthermore, the expiration date on the bottle had rubbed off. I was sore, but not that sore so I threw that bottle away. By the time the nurse had left my office, I was really suffering. I went to a nearby pharmacy that seemed to specialize in a large variety of Virgin Mary statues but had generic Tylenol and name brand Tylenol PM. Both products came highly recommended from the marrow donation staff. The acetaminophen did the trick! Within an hour, my back pain was almost completely gone.