Sick today, biopsy tomorrow

I have the flu.  High fever, aches, cough, it hurts to breathe.  It is a good distraction from worry at least!  I don't have the energy for much at all.  I could sleep all day if I didn't have kids to take care of.  I saw my doctor, she said not to delay the biopsy, it needs to happen.  She did give me a prescription for Tamiflu and I stocked up on zinc, vitamin c and elderberry.

She offered me valium for before the biopsy, said she could never go through such a thing without it, but #1 I am not all that worried about the biopsy itself, and #2 I am driving there and back.  I have a box of Valium that I was given after my first surgery, to help with the muscle spasms in my neck, and I never even opened it.  I am not such a medication person.  It is nice to know it is there, but I like a clear head.  I wonder if it expired.  Most of my pain medication from after my surgeries did.

I am half resigned to more surgery on my neck.  I know, until we get results back it could be benign, but no matter what it is, something growing in my neck needs to leave.  Even if it is a cyst, it is pressing on my trachea and causing worry and discomfort.  I want it gone.  I really really want it gone.

On a better note, my DH is a doll.  He has been working hard looking for quick and easy low phosphorus foods for me.  He let me sleep this afternoon until he had to go to work.  For lunch, he made eggs and toast for himself and the kids and he cleaned up his cooking mess. While I was sleeping he and the kids cleaned up the living and dining room a bit.  The books and magazines are no longer on the couch and they cleaned their stuff off of most of the dining room table.  It is amazing how quickly the place can fall apart when the mommy is sick, but with a bit of cooperation, and the promise of a trip with DH if they helped, they were able to pull things back together a bit!

I just should have stayed in bed

Last Thursday was not my day.  It started out on the wrong foot when I fell in the tub, got even worse when I stepped on a metal transformer and cut the bottom of my foot and was decidedly bad when my "routine" neck ultrasound went bad.  Even going out to brunch with a friend didn't go right.  The food was horrible at a restaurant that usually is really nice and they were out of ingredients so they couldn't even remake things.

I have a new mass in my neck.  It is right in the area of my two previous neck surgeries, where everything possible was taking out.  This new mass is midline, right over my trachea and vocal cords.  It may be a cyst, but based on where it is it is totally nerve wracking.  It is 11mm, a bit over a cm -almost half an inch.  It isn't huge, but it isn't tiny either.  There is also what is hopefully is just a small cyst in my parotid (main salivary) gland.  This is the same gland that my brother had cancer in just a couple years back.  What ever it is it wasn't there the last scan.  Now it is 4x6mm.  Still small, but not tiny.

I am scheduled for a biopsy on the bigger mass Thursday IY"H.  The smaller one is too hard to get to, so we will be watching it and praying for the best.

Thursday is Teinis Esther, a fast day.  It is also the anniversary of my first neck biopsy four years ago.

This week we are doing Thyrogen injections and blood tests to check to see what my tumor blood markers are.  The last time I had a recurrence they didn't go up, so good results won't be very reassuring, but high numbers would certainly be telling.

And I am wishing that I could turn the clock back and have stayed in bed last Thursday.

Getting serious about phosphorus

My blood work has been really off lately.  Phosphorus blood levels should be between 2-4.5 and mine are never there.  Usually they hover around 5 and we just ignore them.  This week they have been well over 6 - in a range that is really dangerous for my kidneys.

Without parathyroid hormone the phosphorus I eat gets absorbed by my gut but my kidneys don't get the message to excrete it so it builds up and up.  The only way to keep the blood levels safe is just not to eat more phosphorus than necessary.

The kicker is, it is in everything except fat and sugar.  LOL  Whole grains have the most, dairy is horribly full of it, chocolate is high in phosphorus as are oatmeal and seeds and nuts.  100 grams of wheat germ has well over 1,000mg of phosphorus - not that you eat it in that quantity, but wow!

I have tried low phosphorus diets before, and never could get my blood levels normal even when I was good about it,  but I need to do it again.

The goal is less than 800mg of phosphorus a day.  A cup of milk has 232mg, a cucumber 42mg, a potato 44mg, a package of instant oatmeal 143 and a cup of dark meat chicken 302mg a banana 26mg, a carrot 21mg and we are over 800!   It all ads up fast, even without wheat germ involved.

Right now the goal is to find low phosphorus foods so I am not over 800mg or hungry by the middle of the day, having used up my allowance.

Some foods, like eggs, change phosphorus content depending on how they are cooked.  Fried eggs have more phosphorus than boiled eggs which have more phosphorus than baked eggs, so the sum of the parts isn't even equal to the ingredients nutritional information.  Pickles have less phosphorus than cucumbers (25 for pickles, vs 42 for cucumbers) and I can't for the life of me figure out the phosphorus level in a piece of potato kuggel.

Good news is, brie cheese is pretty low in phosphorus at 53mg per ounce, vs 143mg per ounce for cheddar cheese.  Cream of wheat only has 19mg of phosphorus per package, so if I can find any here in this country it will be one of my quick and easy safe foods and oranges are also pretty safe at about 15mg of phosphorus each.  B"H it is orange season now.