Required reading

I confess: I don't always read the books that my two book clubs are reading. 

But the last one I read for my condo book club put me on a path to begin fighting my latest incidence of sarcoma much sooner than if I had waited for my next regular cancer checkup. How many book clubs can say they may have saved a life?

The book we were reading was Rough Sleepers by Tracy Kidder, and a passage toward the end struck me like lightening. 

I had been having unexplained pain in my left arm and shoulder for several months, and the book mentioned a homeless woman whose shoulder pain was wrongfully dismissed as stemming from an injury years earlier instead of being accurately perceived as a symptom of lung cancer. What!? 

Once you've had cancer, and especially when you've had it more than once, you tend to view every new ache as a sign of the dreaded disease returning. And then you try to tell yourself you're just being paranoid. But here was information that maybe my nagging shoulder pain was more than a sore muscle. So I freaked out, got an appointment with my primary care practice, told the physician's assistant about my lingering pain and the scary passage I had read. 

Thankfully, she ordered a chest X-ray and thus started my journey to dealing with an unexpected golf-ball-sized mass it revealed in my lower right lung. Otherwise, it would have been August before I was due for an annual chest X-ray as part of my cancer follow-up at the OSU James Cancer Center.

The PA also referred me to an orthopedic doc, who X-rayed my shoulder and found no rotator cuff issues, so he gave me a steroid shot and some exercises to do. Meanwhile, hubby TC has me doing daily meditation and following an anti-cancer diet. This combination of strategies has me feeling much better while we await further test results and consultations with a surgeon and an oncologist.

The moral of my story: read those book club books! You never know where it will lead you.