They gave him a bisphosphonate in the hospital. I think the urgent reason to do that was that he had dangerously high calcium levels, but that, combined with a calcium supplement, vitamin D, and gentle exercise ought to help his bones. It certainly brought his blood calcium down quickly.
Longer term i don’t know if Prolia would be indicated.
We live in an area that’s nice to walk in, so i think he’ll be walking outdoors as long as the weather is nice. I bought a treadmill a while ago, and I’d been waiting for his help to set it up. I now realize that he never complained about the giant box in the way because he knew his back wasn’t up to helping with it. I will enlist my son in a couple of weeks. (I bought it for me, but it should be appropriate for him, too. I was looking for something comfortable to walk on while watching TV.)
Unless something unexpected happens in the next few days, I’m going on the trip to Japan that I’d planned. (With our son.) We are practicing the things he needs to do, (like applying a lidocaine patch to his back) so he can do that alone. He’s urging me to go, saying, “this is first aid 101, you can’t help me unless you are healthy. You will have fun and be distracted. I don’t want you to be so stressed that you make the kind of dumb mistakes with my care that you’ve been describing doing with email.” The timing is… Not terrible. He’s currently stable, and there won’t be any significant decisions he needs to make until i get home. And our adult daughter, who was about to move out, will stay here another few weeks.
(Her moving out was the proximate cause of shopping for an EV. We will give her the car she usually drives, and replace it with an EV for us to mostly drive, leaving the big gas Forrester for long trips and the times we both want a car.)
There’s a bunch of us here with some experience at that. While different cancers have different chemo regimes there are also come common symptoms/side effects/etc. we can maybe suggest things to help with. Let us know if you want any suggestions.
As somehow who has just completed six months of chemo I’m sort of mind-boggled at the notion of any “vigorous” exercise during such treatment. The fatigue can be bone-crushing some days.
I mean, I exercised when and to the degree I could, but honestly some days just getting myself fed and basic hygiene were at the limit of what I could manage.
@puzzlegal if your husband feels up to it physical activity is a good thing but be sure he doesn’t beat himself up if some days he just doesn’t feel up to it. And realize that while some days with chemo might seem nearly normal others will not and he might mostly rest or sleep. Or it might affect him in some other way. You won’t really know until he’s been through a chemo cycle how exactly he’s going to react.
His initial chemo will be daratumumab, bortezomib, lenalidomide, dexamethasone. They started him on the dexamethasone in the suburban hospital, added bortezomib when he got to the urban hosptial, and they’ve ordered the other two, which he should start getting next weekend.
His voice sounds a lot weaker than it did a week ago. I’m not really sure when that happened, and if it’s from the disease or if it might be a reaction to one of the drugs. A similar voice change was one of the first really obvious symptoms when my mom developed myasthenia, so I asked him to tell his oncologist about it, as it might be clinically significant. Or, you know, maybe not. But I feel it doesn’t hurt to ask.
He’s not going to be doing any vigorous exercise for a while, I fear. Gentle walking and gentle physical therapy are more what he’s hoping for. He’s cooking supper right now, and he decided the corn muffin pan is too heavy for him to use. (We have a cast iron muffin pan, that makes cute animal-shaped muffins with a delightful crunchy crust, but it does weigh a ton.) I took down the ordinary muffin tins from a high shelf, so he could make traditional muffin-shaped muffins. He’s supposed to avoid lifting heavy objects for a few more days due to the two bone biopsies, but I suspect he’s not going to feel up to using heavy cookware for a while.
You probably were told that these can be toxic, which is why they are only applied for up to 12 hrs in a 24-hr period. One of the known side effects that hit me was that my vision that got so blurred I couldn’t read or focus my eyes on the TV - it went away some hours after I removed the patch. Just so that if it happens to him, he’ll know that could be the cause and not to worry.
They didn’t tell us that, but my brother’s partner recently broke her back, and was over-using lidocaine patches, because she didn’t realize she was only supposed to use one dose a day. She got really dizzy and recovered when she took it off.
Yup. The muffins weren’t as cute, and they lacked the wonderful crunchy crust the cast iron gives them. But they were very tasty, and my husband successfully cooked a lovely dinner.
Keep and treasure those mundane moments, and point them out to your husband if warranted. He (like I) may in moods only see the failures to act as he wanted, but if so you can remind him of where he succeeded. Sometimes that’s what it takes to break a person (speaking of myself again) out of a funk. And I suspect such moments will happen, despite all his efforts, yours, and those of the doctors.
He called the red cross today. He’s been a regular platelet donor for more than half his life. He’s donated to the red cross at least 595 times, and to other organizations, as well. This cancer makes him permanently ineligible to donate, even if everything goes as well as possible. He teared up.
But I feel it doesn’t hurt to ask.