I woke up one morning on holiday a few weeks ago with a stabbing pain in my lower back. The “pre cancer me” would have chucked back some ibuprofen, rubbed some heat gel on it and not given it a second thought. The “post cancer me” did all that, then suddenly, out of the blue the following day, whilst still hobbling around, this little niggle entered my head; is this secondary bone cancer? For flip's sake, where did that come from?
I ignored both the pain and the niggling thought for a few days, did some gentle exercise and stocked up on ibuprofen! Then I did what we should never do, I visited Dr Google. Of course at this point you can make any symptom seem like what's being described in the internet so my niggle turned into full blown catastrophising. I'm a fully functioning logical adult with a bit of back pain, yet I find myself planning my obituary!
So here I am, 2 weeks later, feeling almost back to normal. I visited my friendly physiotherapist, who poked and prodded me to work the knots out of my muscles and gave me some exercises and I concluded that, as the pain is almost gone, I must have just twisted badly and hurt my back.
But it goes to show, we're never quite back to “normal” after a cancer diagnosis, and this is something I’m just now beginning to understand.
