No surrender

Day 119

General status update

FEC cycle 6, day 4

Fatigue/weakness: too weak now to do anything, much. It’s BAD. It will pass. This is the LAST TIME.

Anxiety level/insane euphoria (+/- 1-10,000): for the first time the fatigue is stronger than the Dexys. Insane euphoria sadly absent.

Nausea demon: our early morning meds and breakfast assignations are taking on something of an elegaic quality – both he and I know that we only have about another week together.

Chemo Muse: she’s waiting impatiently for the fatigue to stop trumping the Dexys, and amusing herself with the Despair Demon in the interim. Poor besotted fool.

Chemo Brian: on reflection, I think I’d rather like to keep him, and given that the after-effects of chemo may go on for the next 3-6 months, I don’t see why I shouldn’t.

State of mind: will be a lot better after this week is over – I’m not finished with FEC until FEC has finished with me.

Hair: Well, I’ve had the final dose of chemo and it still hasn’t fallen out – who would have thought it? It’s thin, it’s tatty, but it’s still pretty much all there, whichs has been a matter of wonder and amazement to all, and a huge stroke of good fortune for me. I can’t gloat about it, though, knowing the huge grief that losing their hair has caused to my Sisters in Chemo; it really is like being kicked when you’re already on the floor. 

  

It’s so close to the end now, but it’s still so hard – FEC doesn’t want to let me go just yet.

I’m so weak that the slightest physical exertion, and I mean the slightest, exhausts me, and I have to sit down and rest. My legs feel like jelly, and the bottom half of my left arm hurts quite badly inside from the toxicity of the chemotherapy drugs that were pumped into me on Thursday. The nausea and stomach pains are perhaps at 40% of the level of the earlier cycles, now the meds have been sorted, and with extra steroids to boot, but it's still extremely unpleasant.

It’s day 4 and today and the next few days are the worst, so I just have to grit my teeth and bear it, keep reminding myself that is the last time, THE LAST TIME, that 3 weeks from now I will not be entering another chemo cycle, I will simply be getting better and stronger.

Soon I will be swimming again, gliding through the water, the cool silky water, free from the PICC line, free from the needles, free from the poison, free from the chemical prison.

I just have to get through this week of feeling terrible, and the following week of having no immune system, and then I can get back in the pool. My greatest fear, right now, is of anything happening to stop that.

I am desperate to get back in that pool, and I will.

There will be no retreat, no surrender.

Lean on me…

Day 118 

General status update

Fatigue/weakness: I’m too weak to write the general status update today, but the Chemo Demons are all perfectly fine, thank you.

FEC is not going to let me go easily, and today it just came and rugby-tackled me from behind: the nausea, the stomach pains and the quite overwhelming weakness and fatigue.

I am floored, even with the steroids: the Dexys give you an artificial mental high, but they can’t make the rest of your body work when it’s totally, totally FECked. Matron Becky warned me this might happen, going into my last dose of chemo when I was still feeling so very weak, and she was right. Today I didn’t even make it onto the sofa with Chemo Brian, I just spent the day lying on the bed; even getting into the shower and getting dressed seemed more than I could possibly manage.

But I could see it was such a beautiful sunny day outside, and in the end the need for air and light overcame the desire to stay horizontal: it was a monumental effort, but I got myself together and then got myself outside, and walked – OK, tottered - down to the river, which normally takes ten minutes, but today was more like twenty-five. I had to stop and rest on the way. When I got there, I collapsed onto the nearest bench I could find, and made no attempt to walk any further.

But I did get there: Fo -1, FEC - 0.

And I sat in the sun, and felt the breeze on my face, and that was so, so good. 

There’s lots of research saying that fresh air and exercise help a great deal with tolerating the side effects of chemo, and it’s true. Much as I love Chemo Brian, getting outside and moving around every day, even if only for a short while, is so important: and apart from the physical benefits, it stops you feeling like a prisoner.

R, who’d been out taking his little boy to the Science Museum, came and collected me from my bench, gave me a mild scolding for overtaxing myself, and walked me home.

I could have made it on my own, but it was so much better with his arm to hold on to.