• Health,  Pain,  Slider

    Chronic Pain & Me

    In December 2017 I was diagnosed with Cervical Cancer for the first time. I didn’t know what “having cancer” would entail and I never expected the level of pain that it would cause me both physically and emotionally. Although I managed to find myself in remission from the cancer itself, it left me with a stark reminder of it: constant pain. We flew through the basic pain killers going from paracetamol to morphine to fentanyl pretty quickly as well as drugs like Gabapentin to try and control the neuropathy that formed in my feet initially due to the chemotherapy. By the time I finished treatment the neuropathy began to spread…

  • Health,  Pain

    The Thing about pain management…

    Pain management is a really tricky thing. It’s a like trying to walk through a whirlwind to find the middle of the storm, a place of sanctuary and peace. Once you climb up the opioid ladder there aren’t many places left to go, and it becomes less about medications and more about exploring alternative avenues of pain relief. Acupuncture is highly recommended to help with neuropathic pain (nerve pain from broken or damaged nerves) and also to help with the hot flashes from the menopause. But it IS hard to find an acupuncturist who has the relevant experience of dealing with a cancer patient with damaged nerves, but I’m still…

  • Health

    A long overdue update

    Oh goodness, it’s been such a long time since I did a proper update. Things have been hard in so many ways. Now I’m just trying to think of where to begin to really update you. I guess a while back in July seems a good place to start, when I first heard the term “long term prospects” and was told that palliative care would be starting to had over to the pain clinic. This was amazing news but with the end of my radiotherapy came the beginning of my neuropathy. Neuropathic pain is notoriously hard to manage. There are drugs available to help but they often aren’t the loan…

  • Cancer,  Health,  Mental Health,  Slider

    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…

  • Cancer,  Slider

    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…