The Chemotherapy Diaries

Another treatment day rolls around. I had secretly hoped that my platelets would be too low for treatment to go ahead. My pre-treatment bloods appointment was on Friday this time at 11:05, the day before I come into the hospital for treatment. I’ve developed a habit of looking at the amount of blood on the cotton wool when I take it off my arm after my blood test. If there is a larger amount of blood on the wool, it is an indicator that my blood platelets may have been lower because my blood hasn’t clotted as quickly as usual. If there is only a small speck, I know that they’re likely to be fine. As I sat in the car park, about to drive home, I took the cotton wool off and assessed it. There was more than usual, but not as much as the last cycle where treatment had to be delayed due to low platelets. For the rest of the afternoon, I kept my phone close to me in case the hospital called. They didn’t, and I find myself starting to write this whilst sitting on the chemotherapy ward, receiving treatment number 11. It is for the best that it has gone ahead really. I’ve only got to do this one more time after today and then I will have finished the full 12 sessions. My future from there is in the hands of my oncology team.

This morning, I signed in at the desk as normal and handed over my hospital appointment card so the receptionist can write down my next fortnight of appointments. I sat down for about 3 minutes in the waiting area before my name popped up on the screen. One of the advantages of having your treatment at 8:30 in the morning on Saturday is that you beat all of the chemotherapy queues. When I attend appointments during the week, I sit listening to the chitter-chatter around me in the busy waiting room. British people love to complain about trivial matters, so when you throw cancer and chemotherapy into the mix, they really get the wind in their complaint sails. I understand it to an extent and I have certainly commented on the wait times to friends and family, but some of the conversations you overhear in the waiting room start falling under the ‘toxic’ category. “I’ve never waited less than 2 hours for any appointments at this hospital. They’re absolutely useless,” one elderly man said to a lady sitting next to him as I waited for my blood appointment on Friday. I laughed a bit to myself and he turned and shot me a glance. I didn’t return the gesture – I’m here to fight cancer, not someone’s grandad. It was such a gross exaggeration that I couldn’t help but laugh. I also don’t like the way that they try and influence any stranger sitting near them that will give them an ear too. It just feels wrong. Notice that I used the word ‘commented’ instead of ‘complained’ when referring to myself… I’m clearly tactically absconding any guilt I may feel at having complained in the past. I don’t try and influence people around me, though, and I remind myself that the hospital is running a complex operation involving people’s lives. We should be grateful that we get such incredible care without being bankrupted. I appreciate that it is hard to fully feel that when you have waited for two hours to start your chemotherapy treatment, but we should still try.

Anyway, I made my way upstairs and sat down in the chair. I opened up my appointment card to see that I have an appointment with my oncology team this cycle. That is quite unusual. The nurse handed me the steroids and anti-nausea medication to take before my treatment starts. “Do you know if it is standard procedure to meet with your oncology team during cycle 11?” I asked. “Yes it’s part of the standard protocol,” she replied, smiling at me and putting her hand on my shoulder. “Thank fuck for that,” I didn’t mean to swear, it just happened. The nurse laughed. I had to take my top off so they could reach my port to insert the needle. There was a student nurse shadowing her today, which meant I had to talk two people through my tattoos this time instead of just one.

Once the treatment was up and running, I studied my appointment card again. Next to the final treatment appointment, the receptionist had written ‘last one’. They usually leave this column on the card blank. I wondered if this was her communicating a positive message – “you’ve done it,” I read in the subtext. Maybe that’s just my mind romanticising things. The same thing happens when I see my hospital number and think about its familiarity now. It feels as comfortable as my middle name or the numbers that make up my birthday. When I picture my hospital number in my head, it has a blue background like the hospital appointment card. I want to get it tattooed on me one day. Hopefully, it will carry a message of survival and strength, not one of sad solace. A song that means a lot to me came on random through my headphones as I sat contemplating it. The moment felt anthemic, like a scene from a film when something significant happens and a song introduced earlier in the theme comes on to underscore it. Is this what real hope feels like? I hope so. Hopefully, I’ll hold onto it until the scan.

I’ve made the nurses a cappuccino cake today. It has gone down very well. The cake consists of two chocolate sponge cakes, with whipped cream used to sandwich them together and then to decorate the top. The whipped cream has a small amount of strongly brewed coffee added to it. You have to let the coffee cool down before adding it so it doesn’t spoil the cream. The top is then dusted with drinking chocolate. It’s a very delicious cake if I may say so myself, and if I may not, I have been told it is delicious by 6 nurses so far, so it is delicious. Capiche?

Cycle 10 was a weird one. Having tested positive for coronavirus right at the start of the fortnight, I had a rough first week. Most of it was spent sleeping and feeling extremely lethargic. My throat was hurting a lot from coughing, something which doesn’t seem to be abating despite me not having a consistent cough for over a week now. I’ve also been feeling much shorter of breath than usual. About a week ago, I was baking when I started feeling very light-headed. Looking at my watch, it told me that my HR was 115 – very high considering I was standing idle and mixing some ingredients together. I had to go and lay down for 20 minutes then make my way back to the kitchen to resume. It shot straight back up again as soon as I did and I gave up caring. The cake won’t make itself. I think that was the first time I made the cappuccino cake, come to think of it. I always practice the cake I’m going to make the nurses earlier in the cycle to test it. Maybe it was the anticipation. If it was, entering Bake-off would definitely give me a heart attack. Would be good for ratings though, I guess.

There was a huge positive in cycle 10, though. I finally made it to London for a visit! My good friend Dan took me in for a few days. I knew I wasn’t in hospital until the Friday for my blood test and I was feeling pretty up to it, so I figured it was as good a time as any. I headed down on Monday and stayed until Thursday. I saw my lovely sister Becky in her workplace at The British Library. I hadn’t been in the building before so she showed me around. We had some delicious kombucha, a drink that my other sister, Josie, used to brew when we lived together in London. I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen kombucha brewing, but it is disgusting. She used to brew it in a large glass bottle on the kitchen counter. Inside was a cider yellow liquid with a thick culture floating in the middle. It wouldn’t look out of place in a horror film, in that scene where they pan around a dimly lit room with unusual-looking objects in jars of fluid, some reminiscent of human or animal remains. I tried to block the image out of my head as I sipped from the bottle. This kombucha was raspberry flavour; the raspberries really performed a miracle. The pleasant taste of the drink was stronger than the memory of brewing kombucha and I couldn’t pay it a bigger compliment.

My other lovely sister Josie (Kombucha Josie as she will now be known in the blog) and her husband Keiran then took me out that evening to Mowgli, an Indian street food restaurant that I’ve been wanting to try for a while. Keiran likes to brag about how rich he is after a couple of good years in his job. I let that slide so long as he offers to pay for things. You gotta put your money where your mouth is if you’re going to make those claims! And he did, to be fair to him. He’s also one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, so he does bring a lot to the table. That’s pretty much what he wanted me to say anyway. He paid healthily for that compliment so I hope he enjoys reading it.

The trip did so much for my mental well-being. You can get trapped in cycles in life and not realise how negatively something is affecting you. My cycle is mostly centred around my treatment. I didn’t realise how much the constraints of it were weighing on me. Doing something which feels nuanced and different can trigger a change in your mind. As I sat on the train home from being in London, I realised that I have been stuck in a bad place. For all the love, support and care that I feel from my family, the people who message me through the blog and beyond, I feel bad saying it. There are so many amazing people supporting me and I’m incredibly grateful to everyone. The human mind is complex, though, and you yourself can be clueless as to where your head is really at. I felt a calm and pleasantness that I hadn’t for a while. It felt like I’d achieved something. I managed to see a few of my amazing friends whilst down there too – I thought about them and smiled. I can’t wait to go back.

It almost certainly comes through in the blogs. The fact that the volume of blogs has decreased so much probably speaks for itself. I haven’t been filling my time differently and I’m still not working, so it isn’t due to any changes in the amount of time I have available to do it. It’s hard to put yourself out there when you are feeling down; I’ve certainly felt more conscious of the things I’m writing and how negative they sound, which makes me withdraw more. I’ve also felt quite critical of myself recently, not finding the things I want to write about interesting enough, and so deciding to scrap a lot of ideas. I’ve also had a few tough cycles in a row which bring their own challenges. Still, the blog started out as a place of escape. I hope that it remains that way. It is feeling that way at the minute.

Again, I want to thank everyone for their support. I wrote something on LinkedIn last month and received so many messages through that platform, from old friends as well as a few strangers who related to the content. It speaks again of the power of social media and the benefit to be derived from it. I was slow to respond in some cases but hopefully, I got back to everyone. If I didn’t, send me another message telling me how horrifically rude and undeserving of your well-wishes I am. I can take the criticism. I’ve got cancer and I seem to be dealing with that. Sort of. Sometimes.

That does remind me – I received my first ‘hate’ comment on the blog. It was quite comical and I wish I hadn’t deleted it from my ‘Spam’ section. I actually regret not approving it and letting it sit on the blog. It started off with a backhanded compliment saying something along the lines of “This blog post had such potential. It was unfortunate to find just another person complaining and moaning about things in their life that they should be grateful for.” The person actually wrote quite the paragraph critiquing me. The funniest part is that they had written the comment on one of my older blog posts which really wasn’t very negative at all. I read it back and felt genuine confusion over it. Maybe they had written it on the wrong post? I’m not sure. It’s good to read someone’s opinion, though, and I actually agree that I have moaned about things in this blog that I should feel grateful for. It’s hard to have that sort of purist approach to everything in life though, right? I think I am quite a conscientious person generally, and I like to try and check myself on the things I am feeling, saying and writing. The only reason that I deleted the comment was that it didn’t feel like it was offering me a lot of value to have publically sat on the blog, alongside other people’s sincere comments, where they are sharing personal stories and well-wishes. Next time I will approve it I promise, whoever you were. I’m ready for round 2.

It’s been a while since I’ve shared any Lucy content. The below video may fool you into thinking she is running through extremely tall grass. She isn’t. She’s just THAT small. Damn, she’s just that cute, too. We like to put videos of her in slow motion to add to the comedy. I hope you enjoy!