Life and How To Live It
Life, once it has its hands around your throat, never seems to let up. I've been doing my best to pretend I don't have cancer and my wife has been sleeping badly while it haunts her dreams.
So where am I at?
Three weeks ago it was all but confirmed that there appears to be a spread of cancer to lymph nodes in my chest. (And neck, and abdomen, but let's not worry too much about that). PET scans reveal larger than normal uptake of glucose. Detailed CT scans relate these to lymph nodes, though at this stage (ie over a month ago now) the nodes were all of normal size.
I have phantom pain, potentially real pain, everywhere I think the scan has shown. But not all the time. And sometimes only when I think about it. And then sometimes it's the throat or the knee or the... and we're really only chasing shadows so what point in that?
About two days after my scans showed probable recurrence my father had a mild stroke. I flew home for a whirlwind 3-day visit to see how he was, and thankfully he's pretty good. Doesn't want to become a vegan though, but me, my mother and especially my sister are all saying this is the way forward. His taste buds are fucked up so it's even harder. Apart from that he seemed pretty good to me. He was still out there with an axe chopping wood, lighting fires, rounding up sheep, and going back to his day-job for a few hours each morning.
Ah, nothing like a bit of pressure to perform, eh?
So upon my return my bowel went into overdrive and I had debilitating diarrohea for four days spread over the week. And to raise it a notch I decided to also throw up while litres of fluid coursed from my arse. Colonscopy prep-style. Two kilograms lighter and one week later I'm still trying to recover. Everything went haywire again yesterday, but not to the degree and force of the colonoscopy experience. It seemed my large-bowel-masquerading-as-rectum forget how to do the job it had been trained up over the last two years for and went back to a one-car carpark. The car soon became a motorbike. Then simply a child's scooter. Toilet-bound again. To cut the metaphor, anytime anything trickled from bowel into the rectum I thought I was about to shit my pants. And I would have if it wasn't for the fact they had already been shat in.
And what of my continuing treatment?
Lots of people (friends, acquaintances, people who don't read blogs) ask us how I'm going. How's the chemo going? How's the going?
Right. I'm not taking anything. I HAVEN'T ALL FUCKING YEAR. Chemo doesn't work. I've exhausted the publicly-funded wonder-drugs. I've tried the monoclonal antibody superduper beeswax spray on wipe your dick clean juice. It doesn't work. I'm not on any treatment. I'm not taking any drugs. My SIRT radiation did it's business and did it's business well. There's still cancer in the liver but it got pretty fucking hammered. Except I've got shit growing in me in other areas now. I'm in trouble. Still. Even more so.
The people who do know what's been going on have asked about the clinical trial progress though. The oncologist told someone would call in two to three weeks. He told me things don't always go to schedule. The day before the end of the three week period I called my oncologist to check that I was in fact on the list, that I would be called. More to ease my wife's mind than my own, after all this shit is consuming her in her sleep, or lack of it. (Sleeping pills, yeah, sure, but they don't work too good either, and there's plenty of other problems associated with dependance on that little lolly). They'll look into it. They'll call me back.
They do. The clinical trial has now officially been given the go ahead. A consent form has been mailed to me. I'll need to read the six pages, sign consent for them to raid my excised tumours for overseas analysis, go in for an appointment to talk with the doctors involved, and then wait. It'll take several weeks at least to get the analysis results back to see whether I am suitable for the trial.
And if I'm not?
What Plan are we up to? Certainly not Plan B. I must be halfway down the alphabet by now. I meet with the oncologist sometime next week (I think) to discuss my progress and perhaps put into place Plans S through V.
At least I hope I have that many plans left open to me..
So where am I at?
Three weeks ago it was all but confirmed that there appears to be a spread of cancer to lymph nodes in my chest. (And neck, and abdomen, but let's not worry too much about that). PET scans reveal larger than normal uptake of glucose. Detailed CT scans relate these to lymph nodes, though at this stage (ie over a month ago now) the nodes were all of normal size.
I have phantom pain, potentially real pain, everywhere I think the scan has shown. But not all the time. And sometimes only when I think about it. And then sometimes it's the throat or the knee or the... and we're really only chasing shadows so what point in that?
About two days after my scans showed probable recurrence my father had a mild stroke. I flew home for a whirlwind 3-day visit to see how he was, and thankfully he's pretty good. Doesn't want to become a vegan though, but me, my mother and especially my sister are all saying this is the way forward. His taste buds are fucked up so it's even harder. Apart from that he seemed pretty good to me. He was still out there with an axe chopping wood, lighting fires, rounding up sheep, and going back to his day-job for a few hours each morning.
Ah, nothing like a bit of pressure to perform, eh?
So upon my return my bowel went into overdrive and I had debilitating diarrohea for four days spread over the week. And to raise it a notch I decided to also throw up while litres of fluid coursed from my arse. Colonscopy prep-style. Two kilograms lighter and one week later I'm still trying to recover. Everything went haywire again yesterday, but not to the degree and force of the colonoscopy experience. It seemed my large-bowel-masquerading-as-rectum forget how to do the job it had been trained up over the last two years for and went back to a one-car carpark. The car soon became a motorbike. Then simply a child's scooter. Toilet-bound again. To cut the metaphor, anytime anything trickled from bowel into the rectum I thought I was about to shit my pants. And I would have if it wasn't for the fact they had already been shat in.
And what of my continuing treatment?
Lots of people (friends, acquaintances, people who don't read blogs) ask us how I'm going. How's the chemo going? How's the going?
Right. I'm not taking anything. I HAVEN'T ALL FUCKING YEAR. Chemo doesn't work. I've exhausted the publicly-funded wonder-drugs. I've tried the monoclonal antibody superduper beeswax spray on wipe your dick clean juice. It doesn't work. I'm not on any treatment. I'm not taking any drugs. My SIRT radiation did it's business and did it's business well. There's still cancer in the liver but it got pretty fucking hammered. Except I've got shit growing in me in other areas now. I'm in trouble. Still. Even more so.
The people who do know what's been going on have asked about the clinical trial progress though. The oncologist told someone would call in two to three weeks. He told me things don't always go to schedule. The day before the end of the three week period I called my oncologist to check that I was in fact on the list, that I would be called. More to ease my wife's mind than my own, after all this shit is consuming her in her sleep, or lack of it. (Sleeping pills, yeah, sure, but they don't work too good either, and there's plenty of other problems associated with dependance on that little lolly). They'll look into it. They'll call me back.
They do. The clinical trial has now officially been given the go ahead. A consent form has been mailed to me. I'll need to read the six pages, sign consent for them to raid my excised tumours for overseas analysis, go in for an appointment to talk with the doctors involved, and then wait. It'll take several weeks at least to get the analysis results back to see whether I am suitable for the trial.
And if I'm not?
What Plan are we up to? Certainly not Plan B. I must be halfway down the alphabet by now. I meet with the oncologist sometime next week (I think) to discuss my progress and perhaps put into place Plans S through V.
At least I hope I have that many plans left open to me..