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Mixed day

Hmm. What an odd day!

I started this morning knowing I would be going out just before lunch to meet some friends, but I knew I would have plenty of time to start the day normally. I had just finished breakfast, and said goodbye to Gillian as she went to work, when I started feeling a little queasy. Then I felt a lot queasy and very shortly I was vomiting up my breakfast and all the tea I had drunk. There was a huge amount of it! I could tell exactly how much there was because the inside of the disposable sick bowls given to me by the hospital is marked with graduated measurements. However, I felt much better afterwards, and was able to carry on with my day as if nothing had happened.

Graham picked me up at about 11:30 and we drove up to Ludlow to meet up with Andy at his house. He fed us bread and ham and cheese, and a fidget pie, which was delicious. Ludlow is renowned as a foodie town, so we weren’t surprised to have been well fed. After lunch we reminisced a little before wandering around the town, circumnavigating the castle, and then wandering back to Andy’s house. Graham drove me back in time to cook the evening meal.

Since then, however, I’ve barely been able to move. My back has seized up again, and although it doesn’t hurt while I lie here on the sofa, I’m in agony whenever I try to get up again. It’s the first time it’s been bad today since I got up, when it is normally painful until I’ve taken my morning painkillers.

So a really rather good day was bookended by some unexpected vomiting at one end, and some unexpected pain at the other. Strange. Let’s hope it doesn’t get too bad before the radiotherapy scheduled next week.

29 06 2010 icyjumbo cancer Comments (6) Permalink

Post chemo week 5 status

We’ve just got back from London, so this is going to be a short post, as there is plenty to do before heading off to bed.

On Tuesday we went to a large local garden centre and bought some plants. We’ve been trying, with the help of a local gardening firm, to get the garden into a decent state, and our job was the purchasing and planting of some pretty things. Their job was the removal of weeds. They had much the harder time of it, I can assure you. Now the plants are in, I can admit that it was a mistake not to have done the ironing (the alternate task that I could have chosen) as the planting hurt my back for quite a while. I’ll know better next time.

The following day we met some friends for coffee, and had a great time catching up.

On Thursday we went for the first time to St. Richards, our hospice, both to meet the palliative care consultant and to have a look around. It’s still very early to be doing that, I know, but I look on it as a bit like writing a will: much easier to do it when vigorous and well than when weak and ill. It is a lovely place. Purpose designed as a hospice, with 16 in-patient beds and facilities for day care. I hope it’ll be a long time before I need their in-patient services, but when I do I shall be glad to go there.

That afternoon we went to stay with Gillian’s parents, as much as anything to give her a rest from being permanently “on duty,” which she finds extremely wearing. Now that we’re back I can see that the rest has done her an awful lot of good. She is much more relaxed, and looks much readier to take on the world again. Her week’s rest was a very good idea indeed.

27 06 2010 icyjumbo status Comments (2) Permalink

Holiday: Cardiff Museum; Caerleon; and Caerwent

We arrived in Cardiff at lunch time on the first day of our holiday, checked into the hotel and went to find some lunch before meeting the rest of our party and heading off to the National Museum of Wales. We were shown the exhibits by various luminaries of the museum, including Richard Brewer and Elizabeth Walker, who would later show us around some of the sites we would be visiting. The exhibit that we saw was all in a single large room, with the pieces grouped by type rather than by age, which I rather liked. My favourite part of the exhibition was the hand axes, but I always did like a good Neolithic hand axe. However, there was also a model of an archer from the Middle Ages that I enjoyed looking at, although he had rather more and better weapons than might have  been expected for a mere archer.

The next day Richard Brewer was our guide for two Roman sites, the fortress and amphitheatre at Caerleon, and the city of Caerwent, at both of which he had excavated. This made his explanations of the sites particularly vivid. The amphitheatre, located just outside the fort, was dug into the ground, so the walls weren’t particularly high. It was nice and complete, though, and I needed my widest angle lens to get it all in.

Most of the fort itself was still buried under the town of Caerleon, but some of the barracks along the north side of the fort had been excavated. Each barracks housed 80 men (a century) and a centurion at the end. The centurion’s suite was huge compared to the amount of accommodation allotted to the ordinary soliders, but rank doth have its privileges.

Lunch that day was a picnic assembled by our Tour Manager, Denise. These picnics are a feature of Andante holidays, and are much anticipated by their regular clients, including us.

After lunch we visited the town of Caerwent whose town walls form an almost complete circuit of the town itself, and are about one mile around. We walked around one half of them, and along the long side they are extremely high still, reaching about 5m at their highest. In most places the flat facing stones have been robbed away for later buildings — a common occurrence — but occasionally sections of the wall looked complete, and very imposing.

Once we had walked the best of the wall we went into the interior of the town and looked at some courtyard houses, shops, a temple, and the forum basilica. A couple of altars were housed in the church porch, somewhat to our surprise.

Although this has been quite a brief description, these two visits took the whole day. We went back to our hotel gratefully, for a short rest and a pleasant meal with the group.

25 06 2010 icyjumbo Day out Comments Off on Holiday: Cardiff Museum; Caerleon; and Caerwent Permalink

Feeling like Wile E. Coyote

By Gillian

You remember that cartoon with the roadrunner who always outsmarted the coyote? Well, I feel like the latter right now – as if I’ve been running & running and now I’ve run right off the edge of the adrenaline cliff. I’ve looked down and am standing on thin air…..

Running off the edge of the cliff

I’d expected that now I’ve steered Chris through five rounds of chemo, two bouts of radiotherapy, several emergency trips to hospital and one nasty brush with neutropenia, that I’d feel so much better now that he’s in partial remission. In that time I’ve also brought to a successful conclusion four major projects at work, and spent the last few weeks before our holiday madly bidding for the follow-on programme, with another bid due to start next week.

I think that on holiday I relaxed for the first time in six months – at least after it became clear that Chris was going to be able to cope with it, and we wouldn’t need my sister to charge to the rescue and medically evacuate us back to Cheltenham. As a result, I have realised for the first time just how shattered I am. Pretty much all I’ve done since we got home from Wales is sleep, around 11 hours a night which is pretty much unheard of! I went to my GP on Monday, and he signed me off work for a week with exhaustion, and has given me a stern talking to about not trying to do so much.

I hope that this enforced week off will give me a chance to recharge my batteries, before entering the fray once more. After all, I’ll be no use to either Chris or to my employer if I’m too tired to pull my weight.

23 06 2010 Gillian cancer Comments (9) Permalink

Post chemo week 4 status

There isn’t a lot to report this week, although I wouldn’t say that it has been especially quiet. I’ve returned from holiday, had lunch with my sister and discovered that radiotherapy is another, unorthodox, way to get a tan.

Our holiday finished on Wednesday, and we came home by train in the early afternoon, arriving in time for us to do a little shopping, so that we could eat dinner that evening. That was quite a change for us, as we normally holiday abroad, and the journey home usually takes all day, and leaves us exhausted. This time we were still quite lively when we reached home.

The following day Gillian returned to work, and I started on the laundry and other chores that had built up while we had been away. It’s still good to feel that I can do these things, although standing at the ironing board for too long can make my back ache quite badly. Never mind, I just do a small amount per day, enough to stay ahead of the demand, and everything ticks along nicely. We even found time to get the car serviced and through its MOT test (a roadworthiness test that is a yearly requirement in the UK).

Yesterday we had lunch with my sister. It had been a long time since we had seen each other, so it was good to catch up. And the book she gave me as a present was extremely funny.

Next week I go to the hospice for the first time, to meet the staff and find out what it’s like. I don’t expect to need their services for quite a while yet, but it seems a good idea for us to get to know each other while I’m still well. And I’ll be posting some descriptions of the visits we made while on holiday.

20 06 2010 icyjumbo cancer
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A family lunch

By Gillian

Today we had lunch with Christopher’s sister, Sophie. We’ve not seen her for some time, and it was really good to catch up with her. She lives the other end of the country, so we met somewhere in the middle in a hotel just off the motorway. The food was nothing special, and the service was atrocious, but we had a good time simply chatting away.

We took along the slides that Christopher’s step-father brought us, of the two of them as very small children in Kenya, and a few years later on holiday in Cornwall. We also took a hand-held portable slide-viewer (very 1970’s – I remember my parents having one when I was a child) and the two of them spent a happy hour or so going “Do you remember…?”.

Sophie obviously thought we needed cheering up a bit (a good call), and gave us a book called “Bad Cat” by Jim Edgar – captioned photos of evil-looking cats. It is side-splittingly funny.  Chris has been looking at it this evening after dinner, and he has been laughing out loud so much that he’s made his back ache! I’ve now swiped it off him as it’s definitely my turn for some laugh-out-loud humour.

19 06 2010 Gillian cancer Comments (5) Permalink

Back from holiday

Yesterday we got home from our coach holiday in Wales. It was something that we had planned would take place soon after my chemotherapy finished, back when I was coping quite well with it. At that time we were confident that it would be no problem at all, but the later cycles of chemotherapy were more difficult than we — or at least than I — had expected, and towards the end we weren’t sure whether I would be in a fit state to go. Gillian says that she considered several times cancelling the holiday, and Gillian’s sister and her boyfriend both considered themselves on stand-by to come and rescue us if a problem should have occurred. Fortunately, as we’ll see, none of the dreadful outcomes happened, and we really enjoyed the holiday.

We started by taking a train down to Cardiff, where we met the tour manager and the rest of the party. The holiday’s theme was the archaeology of Wales and the West, which meant that we would be seeing archaeological sites from the Stone Age up to Mediaeval times. The National Museum in Cardiff was the perfect place to get an overview, which was the first visit of the trip.

In the following days we went to Roman towns and fortresses, Stone Age monuments and landscapes, Mediaeval castles, and even a Roman gold mine. It’s too much to write about all in one post, and as I haven’t yet processed the photos that I took I plan to write about individual sites over the next few days. I do want to comment about how I managed the trip as a whole, however.

I had been getting weaker and weaker during the chemotherapy, and one feature of most of the sites is that they’re isolated and usually on the tops of hills. That meant that one of my main concerns was whether or not I’d have the strength and stamina to visit them all, as a long and arduous walk was often required. As it turns out, I didn’t have enough stamina to do them all, but I’m pleased to say that I dropped out of only three planned visits during the whole trip. That might seem like a lot, but I wasn’t the least active member of the group by any means: there were some much older and frailer members who were able to tackle even less than I. It comes to something when I am proud that I have more stamina than an eighty-year-old, doesn’t it!?

The other concern that we had before departing was my nausea and back pain, but these also turned out not to be a problem at all. I took my pain medication rigorously and it worked beautifully. Nor was there any sign of nausea. Overall, a great success for the modern pharmacopoeia!

As is always the case, it’s great to get away on holiday, but it’s good to come back home again, even if I do have to catch up with the laundry and other household chores. Now it’s time to start thinking about where we go next, as this holiday went so much better than we feared, and almost as well as we hoped.

17 06 2010 icyjumbo cancer
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Two squares

My back has been a little itchy recently, so after a quick scratch in the bathroom yesterday I asked Gillian if she could see anything funny about my back.

“No,” she said, as I was walking out of the bathroom, “oh, wait a minute, there is something.”

She had seen two perfect sunburnt squares on my back, which must be due to the two bouts of radiotherapy that I had a few weeks ago. I craned my neck looking over my shoulder, and could just about make them out. One is in the middle of my back and must correspond to the T8 vertebra, while the other straddles my waistline, and covers my L5 vertebra. I have some tattooed dots on my chest and stomach, and although I can see those quite clearly, there is no sign of any sunburn anywhere near them. I can safely conclude that not much if any of the radiation got through my body.

As good things come in threes, it’s inevitable that the two squares will be joined by a third for the L1 vertebra. I simply need to find out when.

15 06 2010 icyjumbo cancer Comments Off on Two squares Permalink

Post chemo week 3 status

What a busy week! I’ve been out visiting several sites, of which I’ll write more and show pictures later. I’ve had dinner with my father, and generally had a very good week.

The drugs have been working extremely well this week. I’ve suffered hardly any pain now that I’m taking the Oxycontin as well as the Diclofenac, both slow-release versions of their standard counterparts. I have noticed the odd difficulty swallowing, but I don’t know whether to put it down to the tumour on my spine that we found out about recently, or — worse — a re-growth of the tumour in my oesophagus. I’m mostly inclined to the former as I can feel the effects of swallowing in a band all across my chest, which makes me think it is much more likely to be an issue with the nerves that meet my spine at the L1 vertebra. In any case, it’s not too much of a problem at the moment, so I shall wait until I see the consultant in the normal course of events before mentioning it to him.

Although I still get tired quite easily, and need to go to bed early, and sometimes even take a nap in the afternoon as I did today, I’ve found that my stamina is improving. I’m able to spend all day scrambling over a few ruins and generally poking about, much as I used to do before the cancer stole my strength. It’s been one of the highlights of this post-chemo period for me, and I hope it’ll last quite a while.

All in all, a good week.

13 06 2010 icyjumbo status Comments (9) Permalink

Dinner with my father

Recently I had dinner with my father. It has been a long time since we last saw each other, certainly long before my cancer was diagnosed, and I think he must have been anxious to see how I was getting on. The food was nothing much to write about, but we had a fine old time reminiscing about past times.

Those reminiscences were brought on by my recalling the photos fro Africa that I posted here quite a while ago. I mentioned that my step father had found a set of slides in the attic, some of which were the originals of the prints you’ve already seen. I remembered so little about the time in Kenya that it was good to hear a few stories. In one of the slides Alan, my father, was proudly leaning against our car, an old-fashioned grey VW Beetle. Alan said that it was a 1951 model, so already old in 1966 or ’67 when the photo was taken. My favourite story of the evening was about that car. I was four years old or so at the time, and it was the subject of my every conversation.

“Our car turned over,” I would say, and it was obvious that the event had made a great impression on me. But it turned out that my mother had a remedy,

“… and nobody was hurt.” she would tack onto my sentence. After a few repetitions, I learned to parrot her phrase too, and would say,

“Our car turned over and nobody was hurt.”

A triumph of ingenious parenting! It was a fun evening. I hope it won’t be so long before the next one.

11 06 2010 icyjumbo cancer Comments Off on Dinner with my father Permalink