How it all started

Middle February to today, 15th April 2014

Approximately 9 weeks ago Jimmy started complaining that his back was sore.  We spend a lot of time making excuses for our ailments and this is exactly what I did. I told him that he probably slept funny.  Over the next few weeks his back would be painful and then it would feel better and then he would play a round of golf or a game of squash and it would be sore again.

Jimmy has a group of friends and each year they go away on a golf tour together, some male bonding without their wives to moan about golf.  The guys had planned their annual golf tour and were due to leave on the 12th of March. Jimmy was adamant that his back would be fine by then.  I suggested he take some anti-inflammatory tablets for a week because this is generally what a GP would prescribe.  The weekend before they left he complained his back was really sore and he wasn't sure if he would be able to play golf or not.  He decided that since he had paid he would go along and only play if his back felt better.  They left on the Wednesday and each night Jimmy would phone and tell me how he had been agony the whole day.  How he was battling to get out of bed in the mornings and the guys were having to help him put his shoes on because he couldn't bend down at all.

He got back from tour and went to see our GP who put him on a week's course of anti-inflammatory tablets.  These didn't really help. The following week we went camping with a group of friends and he basically couldn't do anything.  We got back and he went to see our GP again who gave him a Cortisone injection.  Two days later it still didn't feel any better so our GP suggested Jimmy go for X-rays and he took some bloods.  The X-rays came back and they couldn't pick up anything and the only negative that came back from the blood tests was that Jimmy's iron levels were low so we got him some iron tablets and another script for some stronger painkillers.

At this stage Jimmy was really battling with the pain and starting to look very tired.  He asked our GP to please refer him to a specialist. The specialist was fully booked and gave him an appointment for the 23rd April which was 3 weeks away but referred him, in the meantime, to a physiotherapist saying that he believed it was a muscular problem and that by the time the 23rd came, he didn't even think Jimmy would need to see him.

Jimmy started going to physiotherapy twice a week and did so for 2 weeks and then he did a business trip up to the Eastern Cape, during which time was in serious pain.  On the Sunday after his return I had to phone our GP and ask him to please do something for Jimmy's pain. He came around to our home and gave Jimmy a pethidine injection and agreed that he would have a word with the specialist on Monday as he said this had all been going on too long now.  I managed to convince Jimmy to stay home on the Monday to try and rest his back but on Monday morning we tried for about 40 minutes and could not get him out of bed.  Each time he moved different parts of his body was going into spasm.  I phoned our GP's rooms again and explained to the receptionist what was happening.  Later that morning the specialist's rooms phoned to say that we needed to have an MRI done today.  She explained that the specialist was in theatre for the day but once we were done, we should come up to his rooms and she would see if he could pop up between operations to look at the results.

This he did and took one look at the MRI results and diagnosed a fractured vertebra and basically told us that unless Jimmy had fallen off a roof, fallen out a tree or had been hit by a car whilst jogging or cycling this was not something that just happened easily and sent us off for another batch of blood tests, rattling off a list of possible diagnosis's including bone marrow cancer.

I remember coming home and saying to Jimmy, "How are these specialists these days, just throwing cancer in with the list of possible problems?"