First, let’s kill all the oncologists..

Day 80 

General status update: comprehensively FECed off…

If you were walking along the Thames towpath between Hammersmith Bridge and Barnes Bridge today, around 4pm, you may have noticed a dark-haired woman in a green quilted coat, jeans, and trainers, with a face like thunder and a wild look in her eye, muttering angrily under her breath.

That was me.

Today I discovered, from a discussion with my cyber-Chemo Buddies, that some oncologists do things very differently to the ones at the Charing Cross Hospital. From my own experience I find this quite hard to credit, but it seems there are oncologists out there who take a pro-active approach to helping chemo patients deal with the side effects of the toxic drugs that are being pumped into them.

For the first 3 cycles of FEC I suffered not only from overwhelming nausea, but also from severe and increasing toxicity of the stomach, which I have documented fairly vividly in earlier posts.  I described it as being like a toxic chemical swamp, noxious, scalding and steaming, and full of tiny little chemo nano-rats digging in their sharp claws; my friend Cressida, similarly suffering, said her stomach felt as if something has died in there.

You get the idea.

Regular readers will remember that, purely by chance, when I was admitted to A&E with a fever and possible neutropenia during FEC3 I met Rachel, one of the acute oncology nurses, who said that my stomach problems were probably caused by the steroids they give you to help with the nausea, and that I should ask for a drug called Omeprazole.

At my next oncology clinic appointment I met yet another new oncology registrar, who hadn’t looked at my file and was entirely unfamiliar with my history: he asked me how many rounds of chemo I’d had, and if I’d suffered from any side effects at all, so far.

I wanted to kill him.

Slowly, with my bare hands.

It wasn’t his fault, of course; he’s just part of the system.

I described my stomach problems, asked for and was prescribed the Omeprazole, and I’ve been taking it for the last week since the beginning of FEC4. It helps, quite a lot. My stomach has been very bad for the last few days, but it hasn’t driven me to the point of insanity in the way it did the last time round.

I wish I’d had the Omeprazole before. It would have been a very good thing if I’d had it before, don’t you think?

Today, from a virtual Chemo Buddy, I found out what happens elsewhere: at her hospital, when you begin a course of FEC chemotherapy, you are provided with a ‘goodie bag’ of medications to deal with all the main side effects that are likely to arise: nausea, stomach toxicity, oral thrush, eye infections, mouth ulcers. This goodie bag includes Omeprazole, so my friend was taking it from the very first day of her first cycle of chemo. Then another person chipped in, to say that Omeprazole was standard issue at her hospital, too.

I started taking Omeprazole last Thursday, on day 74 of my chemo experience, having endured severe gastric distress for 3 cycles of chemo, completely unaware that there was anything that could be done about it.

At Charing Cross, the only meds you are given after your first dose of chemotherapy is the basic anti-nausea medications, and two days’ worth of steroids; if you get more nasty side effects, as you will, and need anything else, you have to come back and beg for it;  regular readers of this blog will remember just how difficult it has been for me to get help when I needed it.

And it has taken me 74 days to be given a drug which seems to be absolutely standard issue for stomach problems caused by FEC, and then I only found out about it by chance.

Read this and weep, my friends – and pray that if you ever have to endure a course of chemotherapy, it is not at the hands of the oncologists at the Charing Cross Hospital.

They will cheerfully tell you that FEC is 'well-tolerated', and then leave you to suffer the agonies of the damned without a backward glance...