24/10/12

24/10/12



ok



I get my head around it all, then in a morning, it all changes.



Had my eight back teeth removed on Monday, all my wisdom teeth and the four molars directly in front of them. Oh now it’s a bit weird. I could say it was tender or really painful but that would be a bit of a lie for when you have a bottle of morphine in the fridge, nothing hurts.

It’s weird because I now have extra corners in my mouth for my tongue to rub against and big areas where food doesn’t get chewed anymore. The last time I had missing teeth was when my milk teeth came out and “proper” teeth replaced them (no such luck this time). Goodbye teeth, missing you already.


Yesterday we had a meeting with Joe, my new oncologist at Poole. It was the first time that he has seen my scans and the first time that I have too. Guess what I spotted first… that’s right the first thing I said was “you can see my wang!” I didn’t realise it would be so detailed, why not ? It is a scan to show up things in your body after all, like a tumour. D’oh.


I did take some photos of the scans and when I get round to it I might try and put them up on this blog, I’ll see how it goes.


So the Radical Chemoradiotherapy is on hold for a little bit, as Joe wishes to attack the tumour with a more aggressive form of chemotherapy comprising of 3 different drugs fed intravenously through a Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter (PICC) line, This is a fine, long plastic tube that is inserted into a vein in the crook of my arm, threaded up my vein into a larger blood vessel in my chest. A chest x-ray will be taken to ensure it is in the correct place. This will stay in me until the end of the treatment.

The three individual drugs then to be taken are Docetaxel (this takes an hour in hospital), Cisplatin (with pre- and post-hydration to keep my kidneys flushed, this takes about 5 hours in hospital (good book required)) and Fluorouracil (this takes 4 days and will be drip fed into my PICC line via a pump that I can come home with). There will also be a series of steroids and anti-sickness drugs to be taken either orally or intravenously.


17 days later, after my white blood cell count returns, it all starts again for round 2.


Apparently I am to expect to lose my hair as this is a side effect to the Docetaxel, oh well, it’s only hair and it will grow back, unlike the goatee.


A further 17 days later again, after my blood tests return to normal, I should then be on for the original plan of 6 and half weeks of radiotherapy with 5 weeks of chemotherapy at the same time.


And again, Wow.


So just enough time for 1 last session on the rum good job my brother has a birthday at the weekend!


It’s still really hard for me to get my head around the fact that it’s me Stevieboy with this disease. I read the leaflets, I get spoken to by a wonderful medical support team and yet has the penny dropped? I can only hope that by my want to continue to type it has.


This is me, Steve Royal. Brother to Andrew.



Have a week.