Sunday 3 May 2015

CheMoreTherapy

Before I begin I'm taking a moment to appreciate my cancer related word play in the title of this post.

*Takes Moment*

Okay, now I'll begin:

May 1st arrived and I was due back in Velindre to see the consultant about my next plan of treatment. So we headed back onto the M4, accompanied for the first time by my mother as this was the first doctors meeting that I could guarantee wouldn't be depressing as hell. 

On arrival we had a short wait for our appointment and the woman sat across from me was reading The Sun. The front page of which made me feel some actual anger about my situation for the first time. The headline in question was "I'm Eating Myself To Death" about a 65st man who eats 10,000 calories a day, has NHS care because of it and blames his situation on the death of his mother. 

This initially angers me because he's using the death of his mother as an excuse. If that were a reasonable claim the country would resemble the Axiom from Wall-E. I know the nation has an obesity problem but we're not all the weight of small cattle.


Even overlooking the fact that the NHS then has to send carers to feed the bloke (I'm assuming with a shovel and a wheelbarrow) and that he has posed for a photoshoot holding a bacon sandwich I am angered because I'm seeing this while sat in a cancer hospital waiting room, a room full of people who in many cases will have done nothing to warrant getting a life limiting disease. And here is a man who admits he is eating himself to death. If he's so keen to get off the planet he's welcome to swap with me. I'll go from 65st to shredded (albeit with a crapload of excess skin) in a few months and he can deal with a brain tumour. 

Rant over, and back to the appointment. 

I was weighed and found to be at my lightest since Glasgow. I wasn't best pleased by this, and now have my parents on a mission to force calories into me in a bid to get back to 70kg as soon as humanly possible. Following the weigh-in I gave some blood samples for the millionth time this year and went through to to see the Dr. 

As I had suspected my treatment plan will now be more chemotherapy. This will be tablets once again, but starting at double the strength of before (280mg of Temozolomide a day as opposed to 140mg) potentially rising in strength after 2 cycles if my blood counts are all good. This is to be taken for the first 5 days out of every 28 for 6 cycles.

I'm using my first month to try and judge the effects so that I can plan a bit in advance for things I want to do over the summer. So far (half way through my first 5 days of tablets) I feel the same as I did before, slightly dodgy stomach with problems eating certain things, but definitely no worse. But I'll be reserving judgement on it as a whole until the whole course is done and dusted. 

2 comments:

  1. I love your attitude, you are a big fighter! Everybody should put their problems in larger scale and enjoy the gift of life. It's hard to hear somebody complaining about eating too much or homework when you are defenetly not fine. It's about choosing and you didn't choose yours! So fight hard, be positive (which you are already) and remember there are lots of people who think about you and wants you to get well. I defenetly don't know how you feel becouse I'm not that sick myself. Hope you can and have strength to make your dreams come true.

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