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A Really Honest Chemo Update – Round 3
I promised myself when I started this blog I would keep it true. That no matter what the reality of my situation was I would share it. Not because I want to aim to scare anyone, because I don’t, or even really to be “educating” people in what it’s like to be a cancer patient, because I’m fairly sure it’s one of those things you can’t really understand unless it happens to you – and please god none of you find out. But because, well, the internet is a place full of smoke and mirrors, where people only share what they want to share and that’s always the wonderful, beautiful…
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A Super Special Happy Mail!
My goodness. I am SO phenomenally lucky to have so many incredible people around me right now. I don’t want to sound like I’m overly gushing, but I feel so lucky. This Happy Mail has a bit more of a background to it. You see, the sender is a very courageous young woman whom I happened to be friends with at school. Her name is Stephie, and when I remember her at school I think of one of the bubbliest, most vivacious girls. We just sort of lost touch as everyone chose different colleges and different universities and all of a sudden there was adult life.
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Chemo Round 2 Update
So, this is round 2 (or 3) depending on how you look at it. The fatigue hit me hard, as always and then as the steroids finished the pain started to kick in and oramorph was no longer helping so we moved onto fentanyl tablets which dissolve under your tongue (and actually don’t taste too bad – bonus!) which worked for a while, until the night that it didn’t and we found that we were calling out nurses every 4 hours, except for during the night when I attempted to get through on fentanyl. In the end, after tripling the dose of fentanyl to no effect, we opted for a syringe…
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Going, uh, Viral?!
This post is basically a big huge whopping “THANK YOU” from me if you shared my Facebook post. I am extremely thankful to every single one of you who clicked share, or commented/liked etc. You are helping me to get my message out there and believe me, I have so much more to say! I’m not sure if you can say it went viral, but it’s the closest I have ever come so I’ll take it!
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Riding The Cancer Wave
This post is in honour of Mental Health Awareness. Cancer is a wave, it comes with many different points and if you tackle it at just the wrong point you’ll wipe out. Some days I hit the wave just perfectly, I ride on top of it. Bravely, feeling strong and in control. Like I got this. Others I wipe out and find that no matter how many times I try to get back up on my feet I find myself back flat on the surfboard under me, and on my worst days I lose the board and get stuck in a riptide under the water. Feeling like I’m drowning in…
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Chemo Round One Update
So, after my initial dose of Chemo in July we were sadly forced to take a break while I had surgery for a fistula that had formed between the top of my vagina and my bowel. Yup. Bowel and vagina. I was pooping through two holes for a bit (hey, I may as well tell it like it was). Stool in the vaginal area is a huge infection risk, meaning unless I agreed to a colostomy surgery I could no longer receive chemo. In the words of my consultant oncologist “it would be like giving you sepsis” – fair enough, I thought. “I’ll take the surgery then” I said. She…
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Motherhood & Cervical Cancer
I am pretty sure I never intended this blog to become what it’s going to be, but fuck it. That tends to be my general view these days. If having the big “CC” has taught me anything, it’s that life is too damned short for wasting it wondering if you should or shouldn’t do something. I am doing a lot more things these days than I would have before. But the hardest thing about living with this hideous disease is how hard it has made being a mum.
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I Don’t Know How
I don’t know how to put this chapter of my life to bed. The one that saw me diagnosed with cervical cancer at 29. The one that put me back on a surgeons operating table, for better or worse.
