Ouch!

Well, I've just returned from the bone marrow biopsy.

The thought of having several large-bore needles pushed into the bones of your pelvis would worry most people, but somehow I had managed to convince myself that this wasn't going to be that bad at all. Local anesthetic does wonders, I though. And besides, I myself do this sort of thing to other people all the time!

Oh, but I was wrong.

The procedure involves two parts, both done after the area is numbed with local anesthetic. First, a syringe with a modest needle is used to poke through the bone in the back of the pelvis, and aspirate (i.e., draw up into the syringe) the essentially liquid bone marrow. That's the main event, the biopsy of the marrow. As an encore, however, a much larger diameter needle is pushed into the pelvis, to capture a "plug" of actual bone for examination (a so-called core biopsy, because the specimen is whatever fills the core of the hollow needle.)

The local anesthetic went in without too much problem. Just a pinch and a burn, like we tell patients when injecting them with the stuff. The two oncologists performing the procedure told me that the aspiration (1st part) would be the most painful. The needle going in was actually okay, but the sucking out of marrow was accompanied by an amazingly dull ache; not so pleasant. All in all tolerable though, and I thought the worst was over.

Wrong again!

The core biopsy was torture. As an orthopaedic surgeon, I can tell you that the bones of a 31 year-old male are very thick, and very hard. Excellent in that I don't fall and break my wrist like old ladies do, but quite an obstacle for today's scenario. The doctor pushed and pulled, I felt dull pressure and extremely sharp pain. We used more local, we tried to be gentle, we tried to be quick, we tried even more local, we tried to give it time. But in the end, no fat needle was going to penetrate my posterior superior iliac spine!

We threw in the towel, put on the Band-Aid, and I, having broken into a big sweat and curled up into a ball, cleaned myself up and got dressed. Dr. C reminded me again that this was really a bonus piece, and that the marrow sample was the real money that we were after. And did they ever get plenty of that stuff out.

It will take somewhere between two to four days to get back results of the various tests that will be run on the marrow. Then it's more discussions with my oncologists here and downtown, to decide what chemotherapy we embark upon.

I left their office with a slight limp; it's the kind of pain you'd have if you slipped on some ice and landed on your behind. Except it's 99° here in New York today, and not any black ice to be found anywhere. I was limping even more when I got home, and so to prophylactically stay ahead of the pain, I just took a couple of Vicodin tablets still left over from my maxillary biopsy. (or, as we say in the Bronx, "I drinks the Beeco-deen!").

Oh, and to make sure it wasn't on an empty stomach, I had a sizable slice of the chocolate-banana bread which my cousin Emily baked for me this weekend!

addendum: This, by the way, is the same cousin Emily who is training for the NYC Marathon this year along with Team in Training -- as a fundraiser for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Check out the link on the sidebar, and help her raise money for a good cause! (Oh, and she started doing this way before my little health problem surfaced. Go Emily!)

Comments

[Ann Elliott (aka Alissa's Mom)]

Sam, thanks for creating this site for all of us who don't want to "bother you" but want to know every bit of news. Charles (Alissa's Dad) and I think about you every day. You are such a wonderful friend to Alissa that it makes you very dear to our hearts. Alissa is a wonderful judge of character and so we know you are a great individual. Ann