@rivermaya34 Hey, girl. These battles are a package deal, not only physical, but behavioral and emotional. You perfectly found the words to acknowledge your feelings. While you work with doctors and continue ruling possible causes, how have you been handling your mental health? What tools have you found to help yourself navigate rough patches? I feel your stress coming through and I really want you to know how important stress management is to your condition.

As much as talking on Connect is helpful, I caution you to be mindful of pain behaviors. Pain behaviors are anything you do, say, or think that remind you of pain. Pain behaviors access our pain pathways which is not in our best interest. Symptons don't need to be fed more fuel to their fire, especially when they are exaggerated, as you describe.

Unfortunately life happens, right? We can't help what occurs, but we can work on changing our response to it. Your poor friend with stage 4 cancer (I'm so sorry), your quest for health answers, school, pain management. Please give yourself grace, find happy distractions, journal your feelings, find gratitude and journal that too. Have you learned diaphragmatic breathing yet? I find it very helpful along with mindfulness and meditation. Learning to calm the mind and body is one of the best medicines you can provide yourself. These are things that work for me and believe me I have trained myself out of necessity.

I'm proud of you for giving it your all and being invested in all you do. Stay strong, you can get through this. Will you please keep me posted on your last test results and if there were findings?

You got this, my friend.