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Two Years On
Two years ago today I attended my first colposcopy appointment. I was 29 years old and I had just had my second baby. I was pretty much exuding happiness, tired happiness, but happiness nonetheless. Cancer. It’s a word none of us want to hear, ever. Not for ourselves or for those around us. It’s deceitful, it’s cunning and sly. It hides and it eludes is. It puts those who are diagnosed with it through hell (and that’s putting it mildly). It’s the word I heard by the end of that first appointment. As time goes by I become increasingly aware that I’m able to examine this memory from different angles.…
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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…
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The Final Cycle Update
Here it is, the final update for primary chemotherapy that really began in early July 2018 and finished on the 4th of January 2019. Before it began I knew it would be hard but it turns out nothing prepares you for chemo. We barely began and had to stop for me to have a colostomy. From then on we rolled with the punches. Stent changes and virus’ cost me good weeks and the pain from flares was like nothing I had ever known.
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Chemo Round 4 update
Well! Hello there! It has been a while, hasn’t it? It’s been a particularly challenging cycle and it has sadly kept me from doing what I love most – writing.
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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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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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Face Painting Fun
Chemo good weeks are for spending doing the sort of things I can’t do when I’m in the depths of it. They are treasured time, and during my last good week my gorgeous and I decided to try our hand at face painting. How hard can it be I thought? Well, the set of paints from Snazaroo (courtesy of Amazon Prime) were a bit dry and hard to work with, but we had so much fun! I reckon the results were pretty good (well, for O anyway!) I managed to turn my girl into a beautiful fairy with lots of magical powers and she turned me into a cat… kind…
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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…
