It started with a very pretty little sparkling firework display while I was trying to get to sleep on Wednesday night after returning from the hospital. This replaced the ever-retreating bands of colour I normally see while I’m falling asleep with something a little more active. The display responded to things I heard, so it […]
By Gillian Today is Christopher’s 46th birthday, and he is spending it in Cheltenham General Hospital’s Oncology ward. Not how we had envisaged spending it! The nurses are making a big fuss of him. They brought him a chocolate biscuit with candle on it and sang “Happy Birthday” to him. I’ve got his presents and […]
By Gillian on behalf of Chris We were hoping that Chris would be admitted to Cheltenham hospital on Sunday morning to start the chemotherapy. The consultant oncologist had written on his notes “MUST (underlined three times) be admitted on Sunday”. But when we phoned the hospital on Sunday morning, there were no beds available. We […]
I’ve written enough about myself for a while, that I must write about some of the people who are being so supportive and helpful. Richard and David have fetched shopping and prescriptions, driving through nasty conditions to do so, when Gillian felt that she couldn’t safely leave me on my own. A lifeline, to say […]
By Gillian on behalf of Chris Chris has asked me to update his blog for him. He has been feeling grotty & weak all day, so has spent almost all of the day in bed. We were getting very low on food and I’ve been raiding the freezer. The main roads are passable now, and […]
Eight inches of snow fell overnight, quite effectively blocking us in. This was a nuisance because I was supposed to be meeting the oncologist today. I phoned the hospital and asked whether the meeting could be done over the phone, and yippee! it could. About an hour and a half later, he phoned and we […]
Into hospital early today, without food or drink, for the fitting of a stent into my bile duct, and hence curing the obstructive jaundice. As we guessed, the duct was blocked by an enlarged lymph node. The upside was that it was possible to use a stent to cure it. The downside is that now […]
Today was the hectic first day of what will probably turn out to be a busy week. Two appointments at the specialist chemo unit, one was for a kidney function test, which I need to pass if I am to go onto the cisplatin part of ECF. The second appointment was a pre-chemo meeting to […]
So, after finding out that cancer is there, and that it’s inoperable, what is the treatment? Chemotherapy. It hasn’t started yet, but at the moment the plan is that I will have three rounds of three weeks of a triple-prescription known as ECF. One of those will be on a continuously pumped drip, so I […]
Yesterday I left you with the news that I had been diagnosed with oesophageal cancer. The most pressing questions at that point are: how bad is it? and can it be treated or even cured? Answering the first question is called staging. In my case the initial test was a CT scan to determine whether […]
