Crash and burn (reprise)

Day 99 

General status update

Nausea demon: we saw in the dawn again together this morning, but the extra steroids and the Omeprazole are definitely helping – this cycle the various stomach side effects are not nearly as acute as in previous cycles. Physical and mental distress significantly decreased. Thank you again, Roma and Becky.

Despair Demon: he escaped from the airing cupboard and accompanied me to the hospital today – it didn’t go well.

Chemo Muse: she rather overdid it yesterday; even she admits that.

Fatigue/exhaustion: acute. It’s getting worse every cycle, and hitting earlier in each cycle.

Chemo Brian: I’ll be joining him on the sofa very shortly – even with the extra steroids day 5 of FEC is bad bad BAD

State of mind: unimpressive

Anxiety level (1-10): ramping up again, on all fronts.

Hair: whatever

  

Had I only retained the sense I was born with, as MamaFo has so very often been heard to say (inscrutable north Yorkshire sayings, no 79), I would have postponed my radiotherapy planning meeting at the hospital today: even with the help of extra steroids, Day 5 of the chemo cycle is not a good one on which to interact with people, especially in a hospital environment with highly skilled medical professionals intent upon performing on you yet more physically intrusive procedures with unpleasant side effects.

I thought the meeting was just to talk about the radiotherapy, which will irradiate my right breast, from where the cancer tumour was removed, in order to prevent a local reoccurrence of the cancer in the same breast –

If you had a lumpectomy without radiotherapy afterwards, there would be a 40 -50% chance of breast cancer returning in the breast; with radiotherapy, the probability of a local reoccurrence is only about 4 - 5%. So the lumpectomy allows you to save your breast, but you can’t really have it without radiotherapy as well – that’s the price you pay for not having a mastectomy and losing your whole breast. The radiotherapy, locally targeted, is thus  quite separate from the chemotherapy treatment, which is systemic and aimed at picking up any circulating tumour cells that may have already drifted into your blood system before the tumour was removed.

- but it turned out that they needed to do a scan of my breast, and draw markers on it, and make calculations as to where exactly in my breast to target the radiation, and as the very pleasant and helpful radiotherapist talked me through all this I could feel my upper lip beginning to tremble, and inside my head I was shouting No! I don’t want ANYONE DOING ANY MORE STUFF TO ME! Just leave me and my body alone now!

I managed not to cry until she went out of the room for a couple of minutes to check something, but then I completely lost it and sat there, tears streaming down my face, thinking I really can’t do any more of this, why can’t they just leave me alone for a bit now, I’m full of poison from the chemo and as soon as that stops, they’re going to nuke me and burn me with the radiation.

Yeah, I think we can say I crashed a little today, Dexys or no Dexys.

As it happened, we had to the postpone the scan, anyway, because I need to go away in early May, back to my former home on the north Aegean  coast of Turkey – an important, long pre-planned engagement involving other people, coming from the USA, organised before my cancer diagnosis. I asked the radiotherapist if the treatment could be postponed for two weeks until late May, and she said that the scan would also then need to be postponed, as 2 months ahead is too long in advance to do it. She is going to confer with my oncology consultant about the delay, and get back to me.

I hope the oncologist is going to be OK with this – until a couple of days ago, I had thought I was just going to have to cancel the whole thing, that I wouldn’t be strong enough to do a big trip so soon after chemo, but then this weekend I thought ‘Sod it – I’ve had six months of hell, of my life totally taken over by the cancer, of belonging to the hospital – surely I can have just this two weeks back for myself?’

I know I’m not thinking very straight at the moment – a weekend of steroid mania, now a big emotional collapse – but I just quite desperately need a break now, after the chemo finishes, and since this trip had been planned long before the cancer struck, it seems right to go ahead with it if I possibly can.

In Ayvalik, where May is warm and sunny, I will be able to sit in the courtyard at the Camel Barn, with a cat dozing on my lap, and get something of myself back. This image has been in my mind again and again over the last few months as I have tried to escape mentally from what has been happening to me by visualising happier places: my old Lloyd loom chair  under the olive tree, the sun, the cat, the soft pink Sarimsakli stone of the the old stone walls of the barn.

picture not posed by a model - that is my actual cat, Ollie, currently being very well cared for by a friend

The Aegean spring is the thing I miss most about my old life - it is incomparable.  A walk through the olive groves filled with wild flowers would do me more good right now than all the chemotherapy and radiotherapy in the world....

I do hope they’ll let me go.