Diane Hunter: In April of 2016, I went for my annual checkup with my endocrinologist for my thyroid condition. Going over my blood work, she noticed that I had protein in my blood and so she circled it and she said, "When are you going to see your primary care physician." I said in a few weeks, I have my annual checkup. She said, "Take this with you, and have him take a look at it because he may want to send you to see a hematologist."
I did like she asked me to, and I showed it to him and he said, "That's not much, we won't worry about it." Well, this was like about April and about July of that year, I started to experience back pain. I ended up going to primary care about the back pain. They gave me a steroid shot some pain pills and send me home because they were saying, "You must have been in a car accident, or you strained your back lifting something or it's from a primary injury?" My answer was no to all three of those.
I ended up a couple of times going to primary care for the back pain. Each time they gave me pain pills and steroids shot. When I brought it up to my doctor, and I asked him to send me for MRI, he says, "You don't need an MRI, it'll go away."Of course, getting a steroid shot and the pain pills, it would go away temporarily, but it would come back. By October, the pain was consistent. It had gotten to the point that it was painful getting in and out of bed.
After multiple attempts to get my primary care doctor to send me for an MRI, and he just refused, he just stopped-- they wouldn't even respond to my phone calls asking for one. I ended up looking up chiropractors in the Montgomery area on Google. I just made an appointment to go see a chiropractor because I couldn't take the pain anymore, because my husband thought I was doing too much, I had over-exerted myself. My appetite was diminished, it was just a number of things that were so out of character for me.
I just took things into my own hands, I said, "I've got to do something, I've got to go see someone else." Made the appointment, my neighbor sent her husband to take me. The chiropractor did X-rays and immediately saw multiple compression fractures in my vertebrae. She made an appointment for me to an imaging center and I went that day to the imaging center and dropped the DVD off to her on my way home.
She called my house and said, "Don't come back the next day to go over the results, I'm going to find you an orthopedic surgeon to see because you do have multiple compression fractures," She told me, "You know where they were." We're coming up on Thanksgiving and everyone is starting to work less for the holidays so she was able to get me in to see an orthopedic surgeon. He like everyone else said you must have been in a car accident and all this and I'm like, "No, no, no."
He put me in a back brace to cushion my back from bumps when I had to ride and stuff like that. I wore that through the Thanksgiving holiday and in January, he wanted [00:04:20] me to start going to the osteoporosis clinic for the ER practice, and I had to go do blood work for that. The day after Christmas, [00:04:30] we went to do the blood work. Two hours after getting home from doing the blood work, the hospital called and said go directly to ER you have too much calcium in your blood. That was the beginning of my diagnosis.
I spent the day after Christmas up until the beginning of January, I was in the hospital for about 10 days and that was when I met Dr. Keith Thompson, who's my oncologist. I was so out of it, that he came into the room while I was like in the holding area where they're waiting for a bed for you and he talked to me and he said, "I am tasked with finding out what's going on with you." He said, "I'm going to do all that I can to get you feeling better. That was the first time I saw him and I did not see him anymore until I was discharged from the hospital.
For those 10 days, they did a complete body X-ray, and everything and they told me that they suspected that it could be multiple myeloma. When I was discharged from the hospital, they did a bone marrow biopsy and that was the confirmation.
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