Jackie got over the harvest, but she wasn't feeling too well and she thought she felt a new lump. I couldn't believe it. She had only finished chemo a couple of months ago. This had to be her imagination or some side effect of the harvest.

Testing time again. Cat scan time. X-ray. Mammogram.

For some reason we went to the doctor's other office, a first for me. It made the whole meeting to review the tests surrealistic. It didn't help that the doctor looked so grim as he came in. However, better that than the idiot who was smiling so many years ago at the beginning. He had bad news. Since Jackie couldn't have contrast, it was harder to read the scans but it looked like she had some enlarged nodes under her breastbone. It looked like it might be in her spinal column at her neck. What a shock! And we must have looked devastated. He asked if we were ok. No and yes. We didn't know what to think or do, we hadn't quite expected such bad news.

What they saw in Jackie's neck was a perennial problem. She had taken a drug called minocin several years before to help clear up a skin problem. The next thing we knew, she was having all kinds of problems, she was turning yellow and her joints really hurt. After numerous tests and the scare of hepatitis, it turned out that her liver was damaged by this drug and it had caused an arthritis like condition that never went away. Remember, look for the simple answer, -- time was wasted looking for the answer when the difference was this drug.

We had a previous experience telling us this. We had a book on prescription drugs, and Jackie always read through the entire paper you sometimes get with a drug describing side effects and the drug itself. While it is a good idea to be educated, you should also be careful not to ascribe each aberration to a drug reaction. It's a fine line to tread and it's a difficult discipline to follow.