Health

Another Day, Another Hospital Stay

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The Progress of the Wound

I’ve spent so much time in hospitals over these past 12 months that I’m starting to consider myself somewhat an expert on them. Sure, the staff at a hospital spend much more time there than I ever could, but they aren’t then forced to sleep on the thin foam mattresses and eat the inexplicably disgusting food. When I go into the hospital, I really walk the walk. I throw up in the cardboard buckets, sulk in the side rooms and indulge in the various sizes of cannulas. Once, I had 3 separate cannulas in my two arms, yet the nurse still approached me and asked if she could put in another one. “What is wrong with the ones I already have in?” I asked. “They aren’t big enough for a blood transfusion,” she responded. I wondered how my veins were still managing to carry blood around my body at all. They were starting to resemble a Kerplunk tower.

My knowledge of hospitals is exactly what makes them so unappealing to me. The overbearing smell of the chemicals used to clean every surface. The solitude of the shared wards, where I am forever damned to being at least half the age of everyone else in the room. The excitement when a nurse or doctor shows up to talk to you about something, only for the conversation to last a mere 3 minutes; a momentary break in your daily routine of watching videos on Youtube, trying to sleep and staring at your own legs. A&E is even worse, though – a holding pen of drunk, miserable and desperate people, most willing to exaggerate, lie and even scream to get a 5-minute improvement in their overall wait time. Pair that with the average wait time being approximately 2 weeks and you get a pretty unappealing offering.

A&E is so unappealing in the UK right now that I spent 4 hours last Saturday night projectile vomiting and trying to withstand some of the worst abdominal pain I’ve ever felt just to avoid it. My theory was that it would all pass if I just waited another hour…

Another hour…

Just one more hour…

Eugh.

That theory never materialised and as I lay there on the sofa, keeled over in pain, I finally succumbed to the inevitable. At first, we tried to ring an ambulance to take me. The last time I required an ambulance was to be transferred from Leighton hospital to Manchester. During that journey, the ambulance crew encouraged me to ring an ambulance in future if I am in a lot of pain as they described my case as “more worthy than 99% of cases that we spend our lives attending to.” Encouraged by this advice, and in desperate need of some top-grade morphine, I called the ambulance service.

Unsurprisingly, they told me that I could wait, but it would be at least 4 hours. Who would have guessed that the ambulance service would be busy on a Saturday night? Perhaps I should have lied and told them that my chest and back were indeed hot, and that my stools were so black and tar-like that they turned the water in the toilet basin the colour of squid ink, but that isn’t the kind of person I am. I answered their list of questions as honestly and positively as possible, which got me exactly where it was always going to get me. Deprioritised. Rating your abdominal pain an 8 out of 10 and repeatedly projectile vomiting 2 months after major surgery is only worrying if your chest is also warm… You really do need to be on death’s door before they’ll take you seriously. My last ambulance crew told me that they spend their lives attending to low-priority calls about issues that barely require hospital attention, but maybe they were just liars.

My mum, Anna and I jumped into the car. Royal Stoke hospital is a 20-minute drive, so it isn’t too bad. It was the pain relief that I was so keen to get, and I knew that I wasn’t going to get it for hours if we walked into A&E. When you get an ambulance, you get it before you even make it to the hospital! It is a life of luxury in an ambulance – you’re given your own driver AND a separate paramedic who can prescribe you morphine; no wonder they’re so popular on Saturday nights. I crawled into the back of the car. My mum handed me a bucket, which was a good idea in hindsight, as 15 minutes into the journey I started throwing up again. The car stank for the last 5 minutes, but the bucket was then left in the back of the car, to my mother’s dismay as she returned to the car a few hours later. She then had to drive back to the house with the smell of stale sick lingering in the air.

Anna and I went straight into A&E whilst my mum negotiated the car park. One thing I will say about having a major operation and a history of pancreatic cancer is that you do get triaged very quickly. As the receptionist was handed my discharge notes from Manchester, which includes my original diagnosis of stage 3 pancreatic cancer, all of the gritty details of the operation, as well as the fact that I am now fully ‘insulin dependent’ (AKA Diabetic), she looked a little overwhelmed. We sat in the waiting room for no more than 10 minutes before I was called up. I was glad to be out of the waiting room – it was full of drunk, miserable people. I was also miserable, but the others were really miserable; there was wailing, shouting and some chaotic laughing coming from a man lying on a set of chairs who was occasionally shouting something at a man sitting across from him – I’m pretty sure he was being racist to the poor guy, but he could barely form a coherent word, so it was hard to really know.

The nurse took us into a bay and closed the curtain. As she asked me to explain what was happening, and I started making my way through the history of Dan’s cancer, I started to cry. At some point during my recital, a thought hit me like a freight train. I remembered watching an advert about cancer a few years ago where a woman described suddenly falling violently ill, projectile vomiting and not knowing why. A week later, she was diagnosed with cancer. I sat in the chair, bent forward and holding my abdomen. “It’s fucking spread, hasn’t it?” I said to Anna. Shortly after the nurse took us to a room and told me that I can’t be around the general population in case anyone passes something on to me. There we waited about 30 minutes for a bed and then we settled in. It was about 23:30.

It took around an hour or two for the nurse to put in a cannula, take bloods and give me a course of pain relief. Things slowed down after that. The nurse told us we were “going to be seen next” for a grand total of 5 hours. By the time a doctor finally came to speak to me, it was around 6:30 in the morning. After the pain relief had dampened my abdominal pain, I’d spent most of the time drifting in and out of sleep. Poor Anna and my mum were taking turns alternating between the two chairs in the room – one was actually a stall, so to sleep on it, they were having to lean their head forward and rest it on the bed. It didn’t look comfortable at all.

Luckily, when the doctor did eventually see me, she was extremely knowledgeable and diligent. She quickly went through my blood test results, telling me that my infection markers weren’t worryingly high but were raised. The plan was to do a CT scan at some point that morning. Unfortunately, the shift changeover was at 7:00am so after that brief interaction, we didn’t see her again. After a few more hours I was moved into another part of the hospital where I stayed for another few hours, before being admitted onto a ward. I really didn’t want to be admitted. In my experience, trying to get out of the hospital once you’ve been admitted is like trying to escape Alcatraz. The amount of procedures you have to fight through just to leave on the day you are discharged is crazy. You sit around waiting for the doctor to write the discharge notice, then you wait for the ward to process it, then you need a porter to ferry you to the discharge lounge where you have to wait for the Pharmacy to put together your medication, which has never taken less than 3 hours for me, then, finally, you’re allowed to leave. By this point, it is usually 20:00 in the evening and you’ve spent all day in purgatory, resisting eating any more hospital food because you know that soon you’ll be able to have real food from home, food that actually tastes of something.

So I went to a ward, then got moved to another ward and then went to do the CT scan. A few more scans were planned for Monday morning – the hospital needed to order some of the materials required to do the scan. The CT scan used a contrast dye which is pushed directly into your blood via the cannula which is connected to a line. The type which they couldn’t do was one where you drink a liquid before the scan, taking a cup of it every 15 minutes for an hour, and then you go into the scan. I believe the liquid you drink can be tracked as it makes its way through your body, allowing them to trace how things are moving through. Some of the details might be wrong there, but hopefully, you get the gist. The hospital didn’t have the liquid you need to drink prior to having the scan, so this is what we were waiting for.

The results of the CT scan showed that I had a blockage in my colon. One of the new joins in my digestive system had swelled up, I think, and it was causing my stomach to not empty properly. When my body realised it couldn’t digest food, it went into emergency mode and decided to fire it back out from where it came from. That seemed to explain why I’d had such a bad pain in my abdomen.

A downside to the next scan being Monday was that I wasn’t allowed to eat anything until after the scan. This wasn’t a problem Saturday night, with the taste of sick lingering in my nose and with me barely stomaching water alone. It was starting to become a problem by Sunday afternoon when I was actually feeling a lot better. My stomach was hurting but I was starting to get quite an appetite again. There was nothing to be done, though, so I settled into another night in a hospital.

A downside of being diabetic is that not eating can send your levels all over the place, especially if you’re ill. My body was not only fighting whatever was happening now, but it is also trying to recover from the surgery. The surgeon had warned me that this will likely be the case for 6 months and that my blood sugar levels will be difficult to control throughout this period. Between the illness, recovery from the operation and not eating, my blood sugars kept dropping to dangerously low levels.

For those of you who don’t know much about diabetes – the idea is to try and control your blood sugar levels in a similar way to how your body does when it is functioning properly. You inject insulin to stop your blood sugar from spiking when you eat and to bring it down, and if your blood sugar gets too low, you urgently take on sugar to bring it back into a safe tolerance. By ‘take on sugar’, I mean that you drink something sugary like fruit juice or Coke. You can also eat sweets that are all sugar, but anything that also has other nutritional content, like chocolate bars, which also contain fat, will take longer to digest. That means a slower increase in your blood sugar, which could be dangerous. Your blood sugars can be high without it being dangerous on a short-term basis, so it isn’t too concerning if they are slightly elevated. Low blood sugars can be very dangerous, though, and can result in an individual passing out, with the risk of falling into a coma.

Another downside of being diabetic and being an inpatient in a hospital is that nurses, in general, do not seem to know how to manage it at all. That night, the nurse came to take a reading from me. It stated that my blood sugar was at 2.7, which is low. The ideal range is between 4 and 7, but I consider anything up to 10 as Ok. The reason it had got so low is that my Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM), the device which is attached to my arm and continuously sends readings to my phone, tends to record around 2 points higher than my blood sugar level when tested. It isn’t always that different, but when the blood sugar levels are changing frequently, as they were that night, it tends to be more inaccurate. That meant that I thought my blood sugar levels were around 4.7, which is fine, but in reality, they were lower than this. As I had recorded low blood sugar levels, the nurse had to put me on a sliding scale.

Now, I repeatedly told her that I’d rather manage it myself and that my body will be very susceptible to insulin when my levels are being so volatile, but that couldn’t supersede the ‘process’. If your blood sugars are recorded as low, the staff have to ‘take control’ the nurse told me. The problem is that most of the nursing staff don’t seem to understand how to control a diabetics levels. I heard the nurse repeatedly asking another nurse how a sliding scale works, what she should be doing with it etc. I wasn’t particularly happy that this person was in charge of it.

A sliding scale is a machine which is hooked up to the cannula and monitors your blood sugar levels. The nurse can tell it to give you a certain amount of insulin per hour, which is what this nurse did. The problem is that my level was randomly dropping without much warning, so why would I want to introduce more insulin into my body at this time? I said this to her, but she told me that they had it under control. Of course, that night, I had 3 hypos where I urgently had to eat glucose gel to get my levels raised again. Eventually, the nurse listened to my pleas to stop leaking insulin into my body and changed the amount of insulin being issued to 0. This was happening throughout the night as I was trying to sleep. I genuinely lay there terrified that these nurses were going to kill me if they didn’t listen to me and stop what they were doing. It is incredibly frustrating.

Going into the hospital as a diabetic is genuinely scary – you really see the lack of fundamental knowledge in the area. You are constantly given things like orange juice with your meals, there is no indication of how many carbohydrates are in a meal, which would help you inject the right amount of insulin for what you eat, and the nurses frequently seem bewildered by what to do with you as they routinely check your levels. I don’t blame the individuals, but something really isn’t working in this area of care. You’re far better off at home where you can eat healthier and be responsible for controlling your own blood sugar levels.

The next morning, the surgical team came and spoke to me. “You seem well,” the head surgeon said as he approached me. “Yeah, I feel fine now. I’m just starving,” I retorted. “Well let’s cancel the scans, let you eat and get you discharged then,” he said, to my surprise. He explained that these types of blockages usually clear themselves up and then the subject is fine. I was sceptical but I accepted what he said – he knows better than I do, and I was feeling much better now. That was that. A few hours later I was let out (I did not have to pick up any medication to be discharged with so I missed the pharmacy debacle, which was a relief).

My problem since leaving the hospital has been that some of the issues haven’t gone away. It isn’t comforting to be released from the hospital with nothing – no antibiotics, no advice on what to do next time, or what not to do to help prevent it from happening again, nothing. For the first few days at home, I did feel better, mostly. Since Wednesday, I’ve started getting this heavy feeling in my stomach and lower abdomen again. When I try to eat as much as I feel I want to in order to satisfy my hunger, I start feeling incredibly sick. The whole thing has left me feeling lost, and I’ve just reduced the amount I’m eating by a lot. I feel hungry all of the time, yet still a little bit sick. It is exhausting. As a result, my blood sugar levels are also all over the place. I seem to have at least 1 hypo every night, where my blood sugar drops too low and I have to have a glucose gel. Luckily, when my phone records a low reading, an alarm goes off. If I didn’t have this, I probably just wouldn’t be sleeping out of fear that I wouldn’t wake up.

All of this is worsened by the fact that my wedding is on Friday, so I am extremely nervous that I may have another episode around then, which would ruin the entire day. There are so many growing pains with everything going on – the diabetes, recovering from the surgery and, now, mentally preparing myself for the next bout of chemotherapy. Sometimes you wish life would just give you a break. I really need it right now.

Home Again With Little Lucy

Cancer Free (Sturm und Drang)

godley93, , , , , , , , , , 26 Comments

The Road to Recovery

The Day After the Operation – Tubes Everywhere

I want to start this post with an apology in case I repeat anything I have written in my previous two posts. Surprisingly, two weeks of opioids and painkillers aren’t conducive to a well-formed memory. “Why don’t you go back and read the posts then, Dan?” you may ask. I don’t waste my time reading such drivel; I leave that to my poor readers. On a more serious note, there’s something about not remembering what I said which makes me nervous about going back. They were also written when I was in a dark place – getting very little sleep on the ward and struggling to adjust to a new life, one of diabetes and fighting back from major surgery… a fight which is still hamstringing me now. I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of views the blog has been getting in my absence, though. A few days ago I looked at the figures, and it had received 160 views that day. Not too bad considering I’ve fallen off the face of the earth over the past month!

It is funny that before the surgery I claimed I’d be offline for a fortnight or so. Technically, I wasn’t wrong. There have been posts since the surgery. I really did believe I would be back to full activity after two weeks… a laughable claim, really. Turns out that it isn’t quite so easy recovering from a 13-hour surgery. In my defence, I was starkly warned that a full removal was very unlikely. The fact that you could have your entire pancreas removed was actually news to me, news that I would only properly understand about a week after the operation. I’d been told many times during that first week what had happened, and probably even regurgitated the words to some unsuspecting nurses who were just trying to clean my wounds, or even to another patient in a bed next to mine, perhaps. “How are you feeling today, Daniel?” They’d ask. “Well, I’ve had my entire pancreas removed and don’t know if I still have cancer or not.” That’s one way to kill a conversation. I don’t remember such a conversation, but I know myself well enough to know that I would have told anyone who came within 6 feet of me what had happened.

The First Time I Managed to Walk Outside – About 5 Days After Surgery

The meaning of the words only landed about a week later for me, though. I’d been sitting there at night struggling to sleep when suddenly I started saying to myself, “wait, my entire pancreas was removed? Is that even possible?” The fact that I was now fully diabetic hadn’t occurred to me yet as I was attached to a machine which measured my blood sugar every hour and administered insulin to balance it out. Essentially, the machine was acting as the pancreas I had lost. The machine wasn’t leaving the hospital with me, though. That reality wouldn’t dawn on me for yet another week, when I finally got taken off the machines and had to deal with it head-on. Unfortunately, my first stint as a free man after being discharged from the hospital was short-lived.

I first got out of the hospital about 10 days post-surgery. Though I was incredibly happy to be out of the hospital and back in the comfort of my own home, the relief didn’t last long. That night, as I went to lie down in my bed for the first time, I felt a wave of sickness come over me. After several more attempts to lay flat, I realised that it was the act of laying down that was the catalyst. As soon as I lay back, it felt like my stomach was sitting in my mouth. I’d barely slept in the hospital and felt like I was suffering from a form of PTSD, which I probably was, I think. During those 10 days in the hospital, I felt like I had developed an extremely unhealthy association with sleep – one of me twisting and turning in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of every part of me. Some nights I’d sat there crying whilst 3 nurses tried to console me. “How much more can I give? I don’t even understand if I’ve got rid of the cancer and even if I have, it’ll just come back anyway.” I was inconsolable on several occasions. The nurses sometimes seemed confused, as if what had happened to me was a miracle. Maybe it is. I’m still trying to decide. I don’t think they quite understood what road I have ahead of me still, though, even if it is incredible what was achieved during the surgery.

That isn’t to say that I’m not incredibly grateful to the surgeon for what he did. I’ve since had the histology results from the operation. This is where the lab analyses all of the things taken out during the operation and determines how successful it was. They do this by analysing whether good margins were achieved – i.e. whether they have taken all of the infected areas out of the body, with the inclusion of a margin, assuring that any lingering cancer cells should also have been removed. After analysing the samples from my operation, they determined that good margins were achieved and that the whole tumour has been removed. That is amazing news, of course. It was confirmed that I did indeed have pancreatic cancer, and they now believe that the cancer formed because of a cyst which had grown on the pancreas, allowing the tumour to then take hold. Two-thirds of my large bowel was also removed, as well as the bile duct, spleen and some of the stomach. Forty-five lymph nodes were removed, with two of them testing positive for infection in the lab. On top of all of this, I also had two major arteries reconstructed. The reconstruction of these arteries is why the large bowel had to be removed – something to do with the blood flow meant that the bowel had to be taken out. The lab confirmed that there was no cancer found during the testing of the bowel, which is encouraging.

All of this is very good news. The problem is that pancreatic cancer is extremely aggressive. Although I may be cancer free for now, in terms of having no tumours visible on a scan, it does not mean that new tumours won’t form or haven’t started forming in other organs. I’m entering a period of 5 years where I have to ‘Live With Cancer’, as the surgeon put it. That’s Ok, but it still takes some adjusting to. It feels like being in a strange limbo where I know I am extremely lucky to be here but also struggle to feel contented in it at all times.

Taken During My 12 Hours at Home, Before Returning to Hospital

Anyway, back to the hospital story. The next morning, after throwing up all night and getting hardly any sleep, I made my way to the nearest A&E on the advice of the non-emergency contact line 111. There I was put on a drip and left in a room with my mum for hours. Eventually, the surgical team came to see me and asked what operation I’d had. When I told them, they barely believed me. It turns out that getting extensive surgery isn’t that common, especially when you’re in your 20’s. She immediately set out on a path of getting me transferred back to Manchester hospital where I’d had the procedure, so she did not have to deal with this absolute mess of a patient. I was happy – I absolutely hate this hospital. I’m sure I’ve spoken about it by name on the blog before, but I’m going to keep it under wraps today so no one can accuse me of being a ‘hater’. I will give you some clues – it is located in Crewe and its name rhymes with ‘Clayton’… I’m sure you’ll never work it out.

My second stint in the hospital lasted 7 days and was pretty painful. This time around I experienced several uncomfortable situations. I had a pipe pushed up my nose and into my stomach to help remove excess liquid from the digestive tract. I had a catheter put in when I was fully awake – the first time I had one put in was during the operation when I was out cold, which was much more convenient. Then, I sat and watched as the wound on my abdomen started to leak so much blood that I needed two blood transfusions. And finally, I got put on a ward where my bed was directly in front of the toilet, and I got to sit watching as everyone on the ward made their way in and out of the toilet – what a joy to see (and smell).

Extracting Stomach Fluid – Not My Best Angle

I won’t bore you with all of the minute details of my hellish experiences in hospital over those 2 stints, but there are a few things which feel worth discussing. Firstly, the severe bleeding from the wound. The surgeons were incredibly worried about it as they thought it might have been one of the reconstructed arteries leaking. I was rushed to the CT area for an emergency scan. After having the scan, 3 senior surgeons rushed into the room and asked the clerks to give us a few minutes alone. The head surgeon approached me, staring me dead in the eyes. He put his hand on my arm and started speaking to me in a very serious tone. “Look at me – how do you feel? Not mentally but physically? Only you can know if you are feeling unusual and we may have to make some critical decisions over the next few hours.” If I wasn’t worried at the sight of blood pouring out of the wound, I was worried now. They told me that I may need emergency surgery that night, depending on what the results of the scan said. Luckily, that didn’t happen. It turns out that the skin was bleeding and that blood was building up under the wound. Two cavities had then opened up on either side of my stomach, and the buildup of blood was leaking out of them. It wasn’t pretty. They’re still healing to this day. Nurses come to my house every day to take pictures, pack the wounds with fresh material and then change the bandages. The wounds need to be packed to prevent them from healing too quickly. When this happens, the top layer of skin heals quicker than the inside of the cavity, allowing a pocket under the skin to form where infections can build up. It is all pretty gross. I have to say, watching someone use a little plastic stick to push a piece of material into your abdomen is pretty uncomfortable. One of the cavities is 3cm deep… gross.

Now, the blood transfusions. There are a few things about blood transfusions that are creepy. The most obvious one is the fact that someone else’s blood is being pushed into your veins, and you are sitting there watching it happen. It is an amazing thing, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less creepy a concept. I sat wondering who’s blood I was being blessed with. Maybe I’d start liking different things or having someone else’s memories come the morning. Maybe they were much smarter than me and had big business ideas harboured in their mind which they were now passing on to me. Or maybe they have some sort of disease that wasn’t picked up in whatever screening they do before they let someone give blood. That probably won’t happen, although I did read a few articles about people seeking compensation for that exact thing happening when I was in hospital… Just put it to the back of your mind, it probably won’t happen to you. It didn’t – as far as I know. I haven’t had any big, out-of-character business ideas either.

The other thing that is disconcerting about a blood transfusion is that the bags of blood are kept very cold to stop the blood going off. Not only were they very cold, but they were being infused into my veins over a period of 3.5 hours, and I needed 2 bags. That meant I had to sit there for 7 hours whilst this blood transfusion was going on. Due to the temperature, you can feel the blood going into you, and it gives you these strange chills. My body was occasionally shivering because it was making me so cold, and they didn’t start them until 23:30 at night, so it was happening through the entire night. I hardly slept during my hospital stay anyway, so it didn’t affect my sleep, but it made for a very uncomfortable night. I put my headphones in and tried to relax, but the nurses were coming to prick my finger every hour to check my blood sugars, so relaxing wasn’t that high on the agenda. I also still had the catheter in and every time I moved, I felt the tube pull. As a result, I lay there trying to be as still as possible, shivering and wondering how close to the next finger prick I was. If your life really does flash before your eyes when you die, this is my request to my life to leave these memories out – I’d rather not relive them, thank you.

There is so much more to talk about – the recovery since leaving the hospital, how I’m feeling now, the next steps, dealing with diabetes. I can’t fit it all into one post and considering it has taken me 3 days to even write this, I don’t really have the energy. I’m hoping to get back to posting regularly, but it may only be once a week for a while. Recovering from major surgery really is tough – I feel proud of myself when I manage to eat a full meal without heaving or manage to get through an entire afternoon without accidentally falling asleep for 3 hours on the sofa. My energy is at an all time low and I just feel completely zapped. Things have gotten better over the past few weeks since leaving the hospital, but every time I take a step forward in one department, it feels like another one pulls me back.

Last night, as I was preparing to get in bed, I started feeling extremely itchy all over my body. After inspecting my skin a little closer, I realised that I had a rash forming all over my body. It has been causing me problems ever since. It is the most recent example of life seeming to enjoy kicking me while I’m down. It means that I should have plenty to write about over the next few weeks, though, so that’s something. I’m sorry for going missing for so long and thank you to everyone who has reached out on the blog and beyond. I’m absolutely terrible at answering at the minute, so please don’t be offended if I haven’t gotten back to you. I will make my way through the comments on the blog soon, I promise.

Thanks for sticking with me and I promise there will be a steady stream of content coming over the next few weeks. I’ve got loads of complaining to do!

An Update Post Surgery

godley93, , , , , , , , , , , , , , 30 Comments

The Road to Recovery

Where do I start? Do I talk about the operation and how a team of people tirelessly slaved away, working on my body for 13 hours, making sure that none of the tumour could remain? I wasn’t there for the surgery, so I can’t talk much of that experience, only the fallout afterwards. Do I talk about the stories I gathered as I was taken from room to room, doctor to doctor, fighting infections and numbing the different types of pain that were coming and going? Or do I talk about none of it at all, choosing to look forwards in my life for the first time since last November? “You will go and live your life now,” my surgeon said to me. Were the painkillers numbing my positive emotions too? I can’t even be happy about it; it just doesn’t feel real. My cancer hasn’t necessarily gone – I have to wait for the histology results to find out what comes next. I’m likely going to be back to chemotherapy soon.

It was hard to even think on it all too much for a few days, and I just burst into tears in the middle of the ward when I did. How has this actually happened? There was no version of events in my head where I actually survived this thing. I thought that my role in the world was to be that insignificant statistic who insignificantly died at the hands of a statistically significant cancer. You don’t boil yourself down to a statistic. Neither will your friends and family. Extend out a few more branches in the tree and you are in territory where you are a statistic, another name on a page. It’s how humans process information. It’s how we understand how good or bad something is. It’s how we make arguments about pancreatic cancer being one of the deadliest to have and how you have to be old to even be eligible for consideration. Yet, my surgeon sat and said to me in the most serious of ways, “We aren’t going to perform miracles, Dan. We can only do what we can with what is presented in front of us.” It seems that he has performed a miracle here, or has started the progression towards one.

So I haven’t been told I’m cured yet. Removing the entire pancreas is a good start, and I’ve only ever been told that I have cancer on my pancreas, so maybe it’s a really stupid thing to even suggest that I’m not. I’ve learnt not to assume anything with cancer, so I’m not going to assume anything. I’m almost certain there will be mop-up Chemotherapy, scans, and other bookmarks in the calendar that same carry a familiar type of anxiety. It sounds like the only objective is to get better for a good while though. Another surgeon who was looking after me for a while on the Sunday told me that the tumour would be cut apart the before performing some tests on it. That would help to indicate what the best next steps are in terms of treatment, as well as helping future research.

The headline really is that I don’t have a pancreas anymore. No more ripping on Dan Pan, Penny Pan Pan or Pan Can. This means that I am fully diabetic now and have been learning to interject insulin over the past few days. Alongside my pancreas being taken out, 3/5ths of my large bowel was also removed. Some major arteries were then reconstructed before I was finally put back together again.

I had a strange sensation on the Tuesday morning after the surgery. I’d been struggling to sleep and was overindulging in the pain relief button. It was about 4:30am. As I lay there; watching the nurses walk between their stations and the various beds, checking temperatures, replacing dressing and sitting on their computers reviewing data, I felt like I was in a game. They walked around with lights in their hands and shone them at exact spots for different reasons; because an alarm went off here, because they knew that they checked this this thing every 10 minutes. I started trying to learn their patterns and understand their movement, I was trying to figure out if I could fit in with them. Somewhere in the process, I alienated myself from them, and I sat there listening to the ‘moody’ playlist on Spotify and feeling lonely instead. My bed was in the corner and had a load of equipment next to it.

A few minutes later, the nurse surprise me and came over to get some equipment from the shelves next to me. I hadn’t predicted it. Damn it. “You do a lot for people you know,” I said to her as she filled up a box of various things from the drawers next to me. “We’re just here to take care of people, dear,” she replied with a smile. “It’s 4 o’clock. You need to sleep,” we were back to the games. I told her that I’d lost my headphones a few minutes prior after taking them out to talk to her. We found them together a few minutes later. It was a long night, why not waste a few minutes of her valuable time on my pointless games.

Stories are abundant in hospital, that’s for sure. My dad used to obsessively watch 24 Hours in A&E on tv here in England. It’s a show following the Accident and Emergency department of a hospital for 24 hours. It has everything that a compelling story might have – twists, tribulations, trauma. They don’t need to seek the stories out, only place the cameras in the buildings and wait. They knew that the stories would come from there. We haven’t been watching it so much these last few months. It isn’t so fun when your family is currently suffering from an ailment which affects you, very much centred around hospitals. My dad probably still does, but not when I’m around.

I don’t have enough energy to really speak at length about everything right now. Eventually, I’ll talk more about hospital and all of the challenges that came with it. For now, I wanted to think you all for the messages of support, and let you know that I’m doing well. I’m getting stronger every day and can walk outside the hospital when my family visit. I’m going stir-crazy on the ward and am hopeful that they will discharge me tomorrow so I can continue my recovery at home with my amazing family, fiancée and Lucy dog. The hospital want my insulin levels to balance before taking this final step, and we seem to have achieved this over the weekend.

I’m trying to do my best to remain grateful, but there is a lot of change on the horizon. It’s all very intimidating. I know that being diabetic will just be another thing that I’ll grow accustom too, but combined with the future threat of cancer, recovery from surgery and lack of any pancreatic enzymes in my body at all, it feels daunting. The next few weeks will be an interesting journey through these facets of the illness.

This is also the 100th post on the blog! What a momentous post to coincidentally fall into this milestone! Here’s to plenty more Ebb and Flowing (preferably without all the cancer, but we’ll see).

Last Thoughts Before Surgery

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The Road to Recovery

‘You wanna move mountains, go ahead
I think I’ll suffocate instead
A change of scenery won’t tame
The endless earthquakes in my head
So I’ll suffer through
A means to an end, it’s all I can do’

This will be my final post before I go into surgery on Friday. I would imagine that it will be at least a week before I post again, if not longer. I’ve been told that I will be on a high-dependency ward for the first few days. Once I am cleared from that ward, I will be moved to a more routine one for around a week. Of course, it all depends on what is done during the procedure, how well I recover and whether there are any complications along the way. If a Whipple procedure is possible, the impact will be much greater on my body than the NanoKnife.

As the dietician told me, the Whipple involves the surgical team creating 3 new joins in the digestive system. Hearing the phrase ‘new joins’ in relation to your digestive system is a little unnerving; I can’t say that it is an attractive prospect of surgery. The fact that the Whipple would probably be my best chance at getting rid of the cancer however, makes the concept of having new joins in my digestive system a very attractive thing indeed. Join me up, doc… that felt a little weird to type.

Cancer is always pulling you in a million directions. Your standard of life changes so much that you find yourself feeling grateful to be eligible for major surgery, strangely looking forward to potentially having your digestive system rearranged like a hamster run. Of course, the alternative, to not have an operation and allow the cancer to grow inside your body unabated, is most definitely not better. Imagine telling myself a year ago, “Hey Dan, in 12 months you’ll be eight months into treatment for stage 3 pancreatic cancer and looking forward to an operation,” I’d probably have replied with a laugh and a “Who would look forward to major surgery?” I also thought I was immune to things like cancer 12 months ago because nobody in my family has had it. I thought I was invincible so long as I was either training for an ultra-marathon, or actually running one. Turns out that running ultra-marathons doesn’t actually make you immune to cancer. It probably makes your body a little bit better at fighting it, though, so it was still worth something. Hopefully. I enjoyed it anyway so it was worth every second.

I say that I’m looking forward to surgery. I’m not. That probably isn’t a surprise. It would be short-sighted to not acknowledge what a privileged position I am in to be offered this opportunity, though. There are people that read this blog regularly who are not in the position I am in, some who have been definitively told they are inoperable. My surgeon told me that to the majority of oncologists/surgeons, I may have been deemed to be inoperable given the circumstances, but luckily I am with a forward-thinking and optimistic team who do see opportunity here. I am grateful for that, and thus, am looking forward to being afforded such an opportunity. Am I looking forward to going through it, though? Hell no. Am I looking forward to putting my family through it? Hell no. It isn’t good for anyone involved, but it has the potential to change everything.

With a Whipple procedure unlikely to be a possibility, it’ll probably be NanoKnife. Although that carries a smaller recovery time, it still requires the surgeon to cut into my abdomen and play around with the organs there. Clamping this, cutting that; the scene doesn’t inspire a lot of enthusiasm in my brain. Then I remember that one of the things being cut is the tumour itself, and all of a sudden I get all evil and masochistic. “Do your worst, surgeon! Make him pay!” I feel like rubbing my hands together and snarling as I grin, staring at my own stomach. I’d only be cursing my own body, though, and I will eventually pay a price for whatever is done to the tumour. Whether that price is recovering from a successful removal, or recovering from electric pulses being applied to my pancreas, is yet to be seen. Either way, I’m sure it is going to suck at least a little bit in the days, weeks and possibly months afterwards.

I don’t like the war analogy when talking about cancer, but it can be hard to ignore. It’s hard not to liken yourself to someone fighting against an enemy force, even though you feel like a bystander in that war the majority of the time. You attend appointments, anticipate scan results and cower whenever the hospital calls you, but you don’t do a lot else to contribute to the process. Your war is usually with yourself – keeping your head up, finding a way through the painful days and doing your best to sleep well at night. It’s a war of attrition, but the cancer doesn’t have a brain to disadvantage it. Your brain will do everything in its power to attack you. Mine has been telling me that my neck is swollen, that it’s got in my lymph nodes and that my abdomen hurts more than usual. Sometimes, I wonder who’s side it’s really on.

It doesn’t help ignore the war analogy when you find yourself packing your bag the night before, knowing you have a critical period ahead of you. Last night, I was packing my bag and responding to all the lovely messages I’ve been sent. The war analogy felt real. Now, as I write this, I sit in the car on the way to hospital. It’s mostly silent… anticipation hangs in the air. I get the feeling that people feel more anxious than they’re letting on; you can sense it as we sit listening to the music playing from the speakers. Everyone is a sitting duck in their own head.

Anna has the password to the blog’s Twitter account, so that’s probably the best place to find an update soon on how things have gone. Thank you to everyone for the support. I will get back to all of the blog comments once I’m feeling well enough post-surgery! Thank you for continuing to read and I hope I’ll be coming back with some positive things to say next time I’m writing.

A Story About Surgery

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The Road to Recovery

Dexter the Dog

I was meant to be in surgery last Friday but it was postponed by a week. Part of me wishes that I had not uploaded a post informing the audience of that fact, then uploaded a post in the middle of the day on Friday talking about being in surgery. That should have pulled in some views! I guess you can schedule posts on here, so if my audience knew about the WordPress functionality, they may deduce that it was all a ruse. Also, everyone that knows me personally already knew that it was postponed and they probably make up 50% of the audience of this blog, if not more. It would have surely fooled some people reading, though. Maybe I could have sat Tweeting as if I was in surgery throughout the Friday. ‘The surgeon is just clamping my stomach out of the way so he can access the pancreas. Still no eyes on the tiny twat of a tumour. Painkillers doing a good job but all the blood and organs are making me a little queasy #Hemophobic #ThatsSoSurgery’, the first Tweet could have read, to the dismay and disbelief of my followers.

All of a sudden it feels like I have cheated time. I got a similar sensation when I used to travel from the UK to America for work. It always felt like I had gained a few hours back for my travelling, with the time difference allowing my watch to jump back 5 hours upon landing. Of course, you lose that gained time when you make your way back to the UK, assuming that you ever go back. In a similar fashion with the surgery, I will lose another week further down the line recovering, where I would have felt better if I had been in surgery last Friday. That is probably worded a little confusingly, but hopefully you get my point. Now that I seem to have perfected the art of time travel, I may as well use some of my meaningless time to write another blog post, after a mini-hiatus.

I was shocked to read the news about Japan’s former Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, being shot on Friday. Even more shocking was waking up to the news the following day that he had died. I spent a good 30 minutes in bed looking through articles from every news outlet I could find asking one simple question of them – why did it happen? Why did this man decide to shoot the prime minister dead during what seemed like a routine campaign speech? Further to this, why did he go to such lengths, creating his own firearm, just to carry out such a malice act? I couldn’t find anything provocative in the topic of speech, or even in the prime minister’s history in office. If anything, it seemed that he gained a lot of respect during his time in office, both domestically and on the international stage.

The answer to the question regarding why he created his own firearm seemed more straightforward – Japan has tight gun laws, so guns are hard to come by and gun crime is extremely low. Hence, if you want to shoot someone, you will struggle to get hold of a gun, so making one may be easier. Creating your own firearm requires a lot of planning, providing the potential perpetrator more time to get some perspective on what they are preparing to do. This person really wanted to kill this man, and no amount of time was convincing him otherwise. He followed through with the heinous act until the very end.

In the most human of ways, I was yearning for a concrete reason as to why this man decided to do this, as if everything is that simple. We humans like to organise the world into stories – they provide us with structure and allow us to better understand an event. In understanding the event, we can put it to bed in our minds, by providing an ending to the story and feeling that it was concluded. Sometimes we don’t find out the ending and it bugs us, but that also makes it an effective technique in storytelling – leaving it down to the interpretation of the audience, allowing them to create their own ending based on what they have learnt of the characters, events and mood of the piece. On other occasions, we may not like the ending of a story, and we find it jarring to accept what happened. By not agreeing with the ending of a story, we may discover more about ourselves and why we don’t accept the ending. Sometimes it may be obvious, like when our favourite character is killed. Other times it is less obvious, and we debate with friends over it, arguing that this or that should have happened differently.

I’ve been reading an interesting book recently called The Loop which talks a lot about human behaviour. One of the most interesting points that I have read is about how the brain processes information to ease the load on our cognitive functions. There are so many things occurring in the world around us that if we tried to perceive all of them at once, we would never get anything done. We would be overwhelmed by information, unable to make any meaningful decisions in response to it. To solve this problem, the book states that our brain takes all of the data from our senses and processes that information into a ‘story’ which we can process quickly. This allows us to make decisions quicker than we would otherwise be able to, which was critical to our survival when we were not organised into societies like we are now. If you are about to be attacked, you don’t have time to pay attention to the ambient bird song around you, or the storms approaching in the distance, you need to make a decision about the main threat as quickly as possible to better guarantee your survival. Will you run or will you fight? You’re usually already doing one before you have consciously made the decision.

I’m not sure how accurately I am describing these things, and whether they are mere theories, as opposed to things that are properly ‘proven’. To an extent, I think some of these theories are hard to conclusively prove as 100% correct, other than presenting evidence which seems to back them up. It makes sense to me, though. The fact that we seem so predisposed to enjoy stories and find predictable patterns in the world makes me believe it even more. Those things satisfy our brain because they make us feel safe, as if we understand that to be the natural order of the world. We like to think that things are predictable and follow a plot – it helps us drive our cars every day without worrying about the prospect of crashing, and it allows us to go about our lives without constantly worrying about having a heart attack at any random moment. We struggle to comprehend when a study is done, and the results tell us that our behaviour is irrational. Instead, we choose to believe that if we were in that study, we would have behaved differently, beating the odds and being one of the few that saw past the tricks. When we put a bet on a football team to win a game, they lose. When we decide to save the £5 we were going to bet on them winning, they do win. We curse the universe. Why does this always happen to me?

There are now theories about why the gunman carried out his heinous plan to kill the Japanese prime minister. Apparently, his motive centres around a political movement called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, or the Unification Church for short. The gunman claims that his mum made a huge donation to the Unification Church in the 90s shortly after she joined, which put a huge financial burden on his family. He claims that Shinzo Abe has ties to the Unification Church, due to him speaking at an event (or a few events, it isn’t very clear from the reading I have done) organised by the them. Police have said that upon searching his house, they found other handmade guns. The gunman apparently attended a few other events that the ex-prime minister had spoken at, indicating that he has had a fascination with the prime minister for a while. It is certainly unwinding to be an interesting story, one that almost sounds too unusual to be a feat of real life as opposed to fiction. Perhaps I am simply overindulging in the story.

I have been creating a few of my own stories these past few days; I wish I could say they were happy ones, but they aren’t. It has been much tougher this week compared to last. Last week, I felt good until I woke up on Wednesday. From that morning, I felt tense, stressed and worried about the upcoming operation. The call then came on Thursday morning informing me that the operation was having to be moved, and it took me another few hours to fully decompress. I did, though, and I spent the weekend enjoying the nice weather, seeing friends and family, watching the Wimbledon finals and generally enjoying the impromptu time which was afforded to me by the operation being moved. Sunday night brought an end to that luxury.

Things have been hard since. A few things stick out in my mind which demonstrate where my head has been the last couple of days. At some point on Sunday, it struck me that I should have been in a high dependency unit at that very moment, with a wound across my stomach and tubes going in and out of every part of my body. It then occurred to me that all of this will still be happening to me exactly a week from that moment. That thought didn’t sit well with me. I wanted it to just be here so I could get on with it and deal with it. No matter what I did, my mind went back to that place. It is still frequently going there. Last week it hadn’t bothered me as much – even in my tenseness, I was eager to get the operation done. It wasn’t due to me fantasising about what state I’d be in this time next week. Now, these thoughts are haunting me quite frequently.

Next, my mum’s dog Dexter has been hunting in the garden this week. He is a spaniel, so has strong instincts to sniff out and dispose of other smaller animals that he regards as inferior to him. Monday night he found a hedgehog and was running around the garden with it in his mouth. My sister eventually got him to drop it and put him back inside. The poor thing was curled up on the soil, blood speckled on its wood-brown spikes. It was breathing heavily. We weren’t sure if the blood was from Dexter’s mouth, wounds on the hedgehog, or both. We hoped it was from Dexter, but doubted it all was. After standing over it with a phone light for 10 minutes, we decided to go inside and return a little while later to see if it had left. 20 minutes later we returned and it had left, leaving only small blood stains on the strands of grass next to where it had been cowering. We couldn’t find it in the garden anywhere, and Dexter hasn’t run around with a hedgehog corpse since, which would have certainly happened if it was in the garden. I’ve convinced myself that the hedgehog is still alive somewhere as that ending makes me feel better. Unfortunately, I know that it is probably unlikely to be true, and the poor thing probably ran off to take refuge somewhere else away from the danger, only to suffer and die. That thought isn’t nice.

The next evening, last night, I was soundly asleep with all of the windows open. There is a heatwave in the UK at the minute and it is incredibly humid, especially during the night. I woke up to the sound of my dad shouting at Dexter. Earlier on in the day, we noticed a baby bird hopping around on the ground in the garden. My sister said that this is normal when they leave the nest as it takes them some time to learn to fly. We watched it hop around before it took refuge in a small corner of the garden. It was incredibly cute. Knowing where it was, we kept the dogs away from that spot. My sister had then let the dogs out in the front garden that night to go to the toilet before bed. She thought that the front garden would be safer than the back, as the back garden was where we had seen the baby bird and where the hedgehog had been the previous night. Dexter had apparently made some unusual sounds, and she had rushed over to find that he had the baby bird in his mouth and was shaking it. I’d been woken up by my dad shouting at him to drop it. He eventually did, and the bird was still alive, though my sister doubted it would be for much longer.

That happened at about 00:30. I lay awake for a while afterwards. In my head, I watched as the bird’s bones and feathers were compressed by the dog’s jaw. It bothered me that I lay there peacefully in bed, but outside there was a young creature probably calling out for its mother; the last gasps of helplessness before it succumbed to its injuries. All of a sudden, I felt a strong connection to it. I saw myself laying there during the operation. I felt the surgeon saying the words to the other specialists in the room – “It’s worse than we thought. What can we possibly do to save this young man’s life?” I felt the void open in my mind as I sat there in the hospital bed days later, listening to the news that they have tried what they can, but that the tumour is more established than they could have anticipated. At some point among this noise, I fell asleep, putting an end to the bleak safari that I was taking myself on.

It was short-lived, though. I woke up at 03:00 with a bad indigestion-type pain in my abdomen. That was familiar – it was the original symptom that I had tried to get diagnosed for over a year during the Covid lockdowns. The familiarity provided no comfort, quite the opposite. My body was mimicking my dark fantasies from a few hours ago. It was writing the story for me, telling me that something has changed, that things have gotten worse. I rolled over every few minutes. Each time I closed my eyes and told myself that I was being stupid, but that voice was quieter than the other one. “It’s spread,” it screamed. “You know that it’s spread!”

As I lay there, I started obsessively thinking about the tumour surrounding the artery. I thought about it strangling it, spewing the cancer throughout my bloodstream and forcing tumours throughout my body, wherever it cared to devise them. I felt like I could feel them. It’s the most sinister feeling I’ve ever had about the cancer. I’ve felt scared before, but I’ve never felt so inwardly disgusted by own my body. It felt like the enemy. My mind was wandering; I wasn’t viewing this story as one with a hung ending, providing the potential of different endings, some good and some bad… I was viewing it as a conclusive story – the cancer is spreading, the surgery will be unsuccessful, I won’t recover from this.

Today, as I drove back from an appointment at the hospital, I noticed a single raindrop land on the windscreen of the car. It felt pronounced, yet inconspicuous. I sat waiting for another rain drop to hit, but it didn’t come. “Did you just see that single raindrop?” I said to my mum. It fascinated me. Then, another single raindrop hit. A few seconds passed, and the storm came. A flood of thin rain dotted the windscreen. I smiled to myself. “That was so strange,” I announced to my mum, wondering if she knew what I was talking about, or was just entertaining me as a show of support for my deteriorating mental state.

For whatever reason, I seem to be finding a lot of stories in the world around me at the minute. A lot of those stories are not going in a good direction, probably influenced by the stresses of the looming surgery, and a return to that tense state that I found myself in last week. The raindrops on the screen left me in suspense – what was going to happen? Why did a single droplet reveal itself right in my line of sight? When the rain finally came, I felt a rush of adrenaline as the story concluded before my very eyes. I had been scanning my mirrors to see if the raindrop could have come from any trees by the road. There weren’t any. For a few seconds, it baffled me. Then, when the rain came, I felt relieved.

Maybe there was a chance that my story could end with a positive outcome. Maybe the tumour will be different to how it looked on the scan; maybe they will even be able to remove the whole thing in the surgery and carry out a full Whipple procedure. Even if they don’t, the NanoKnife could do a serious number on it. NanoKnife may even get rid of it, even if the surgeon was reluctant to emphasise this point, due to a lack of evidence of NanoKnife being used to treat pancreatic cancer. I just don’t know the end of the story yet and I need to stop trying to predict it based on my negative thoughts. I’m here for the ride either way so I need to focus on enjoying it… It just seems impossible, sometimes.

A Bump in the Road to Surgery

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The Road to Recovery

The Last Supper – 05.07.22

Nothing is straightforward with cancer. I was driving in my car with my brother Alfie this morning when I got a call from an ‘0161’ number… Manchester’s area code. “Oh no. That’s probably the hospital calling,” I said to my brother. My jaw was already tensing up. What is this going to be… My surgery was scheduled for 7:15am on Friday 8th July – tomorrow morning.

I answered it on the hands-free system in the car and immediately recognised the voice to be that of the surgeon. My brother was sitting next to me and could hear everything as we drove down the dual-carriageway heading to the shops to pick up an online order. I always find it hard to recall the exact wording of conversations, especially ones which give me so much anxiety that I worry my stomach may pop out of my mouth. I’ve spoken to my brother about the exact wording a few times since and have landed on what I think is an accurate account of it.

After the usual pleasantries, I approximate the first sentence from the surgeon’s mouth to be this: “We’ve been reviewing your case this morning and we have some unfortunate news… your surgery can not go ahead this Friday,” he said. The brain has an amazing capability to run a million scenarios in a millisecond when it concerns something of high severity. My life is ultimately in the balance here, so I’d consider this to be of pretty high severity with regards to how important it is to me. In that split second that he paused, I had concluded that they had finally reviewed my more recent scans, that they had seen a spread, or determined something was worse than they originally thought, and that I was now destined to die within a week (the last part may be a slight exaggeration).

“There is a national shortage of the NanoKnife needles. We can’t get any in time for the surgery tomorrow. We’re looking to move your surgery to next Friday,” he continued. He was really apologetic. At one point, he even said “I know you will have been looking forward to the surgery, and I was looking forward to it too.” I can’t remember what my response was to this, but it has made me laugh a lot since. I love the idea of my surgeon sitting at home, excitedly reviewing his calendar for all of the different surgeries that he has going on that week. Upon seeing his next Whipple, the procedure I may be having, he gets giddy and says to himself “Yes! I get to do a Whipple on Friday! 10 hours of surgery to kick off the weekend! Woohoo!” He carries himself in such a professional manner in real life – I think that’s what makes the image so funny… and the fact that he described himself as ‘excited’ for the operation, of course. I’m sure that he was looking forward to it for the life-saving potential that the operation could present for a fellow human-being, but it is more fun to pretend that he was looking forward to it because he just loves scalping away at people’s organs. It sounds quite sinister when put like that.

Sinister seems to be an accurate description of the pancreas more generally. Ali Stunt, the CEO of Pancratic Cancer Action, told me that surgeons need a lot of experience before being allowed to operate on the pancreas. Her reasoning for this was that the pancreas is a fleshy, buttery texture, which makes it awkward to operate on. It also has a major artery around it, the one which my tumour has befriended and continuously hugs (to my dismay). As if all that wasn’t enough, it is also in a really awkward place to access during surgery, sitting behind other organs. The head of the pancreas is in a particularly awkward place so, of course, that is where my tumour decided to set up camp.

Ali then described it as a ‘weird’ organ. After hearing what she had to say about it, I thought it was a bit of an understatement. I decided in my head that I hate the pancreas even more than I did before. Not only is it a spiteful bastard, which once inhibited by a tumour stops you from digesting fat or regulating your bloodsugar levels properly, but it is also a creepy texture. Sinister. Creepy. Spiteful. All words that I hope no one ever uses to describe me, and I’m sure you hope no one uses to describe you either.

Most people probably don’t think about what their pancreas is up to even once a year; I wonder if mine is bothering to do anything about once every 5 minutes. I constantly have to assess my own stools to determine whether they are floating or beached, both indications that my body hasn’t absorbed the oil from the food. It is all very undignified. If they are either of those things, I have to think back to what I had eaten the day before and how much of my Creon supplement I had alongside it. I then have to increase it the next time that I eat that food, or something similar. Nothing makes food more enjoyable than constantly wondering how much fat is in it, how many Creon that fat translates into, and whether it’ll be enough to make my stools not float the next day. Perhaps I should start talking about this in detail every time I am eating, with everyone sat in close proximity to me. That’s one way to get yourself scratched off the invite list to every dinner party that you may have been invited to that year. I’d probably still get invited until after my wedding at least – no one wants to start a tit-for-tat invite war when there is a wedding on the horizon… it makes far more sense to stop speaking after they’ve drained me of all the food, booze and good times that they can; before the cancer potentially gets too serious and they have to ‘be there for me’.

Anyway… the surgery has been moved to next Friday, July 15th. It was a relief to hear that there wasn’t any bad news about my cancer spreading or surgery not being a possibility, but it was hard to calm down from the tense, anxious-filled state that I had found myself in since Wednesday morning.

Tuesday evening was the final plan I had before surgery. Me and some of my good friends went out for a meal at a local Italian restaurant. The table was set out awkwardly, making it feel a little like The Last Supper. I’m not suggesting that I am Jesus here, but I guess I would be in these circumstances. That means that someone in attendance was the snake who gave me cancer, if I am remembering and applying the story accurately. I’m probably not.

It was a lovely evening and we all laughed a lot. That night, I struggled to sleep. It was all over; nowhere left to hide. The next thing in my calendar on my phone read ‘Operation Day’. Finally it was coming, but I had another 48 hours to wait before it would. If I could have sold away those 48 hours until I was laying on that operating table and counting down from 10, I would have. All I wanted was to be knocked out. Every minute until then felt like torture if I gave myself enough time to think about it. I was trying to keep myself busy with work, baking and relaxing with family, but it was getting harder. Surgery was on my mind and my mind was on surgery.

Backing down from that place today was hard on me mentally. The tenseness did not go for a few hours. I needed to amp myself up as the surgery was approaching faster. Now I had to deflate myself again. The surgeon knew that, I’m sure. That is probably why he was so apologetic on the phone. It seemed very sincere. Now, I have to reset the clock in my mind. Another 7 days which I need to fill with more plans to distract from the surgery… I’m sure I can have a good go at that. The thought occurred to me that it is another 7 days where my cancer may spread, unabated by any treatment. I’m getting better at fighting those thoughts, but they still come sometimes. Worrying about it spreading won’t make it any less likely to happen, though, and I’m sure the risk of that happening in an additional 7 days is low… if I was warned that the chemotherapy side-affects can last for 3 months after the treatment ends, I’d hope that means that the chemotherapy is still doing something for that time too. Hopefully…

I wanted to keep this post short so all those that I haven’t spoken to personally know that I won’t be in surgery tomorrow, without having to read 3,000 words of me chatting my normal nonsense. Of course, I had to indulge in a little bit of nonsense – 1,600 words of it to be exact. It is disappointing that it was delayed, especially so last minute, but it can’t be helped. There are plenty of bumps in the cancer road; this is just another one of them. At least I get another week to run, weight train and eat as much as I physically can. I made the below white chocolate and raspberry cheesecake to help my weight gain last night, and it should definitely do that.

White Chocolate and Raspberry Cheesecake

Thank you for all the lovely messages today and over the last few days – I’ve felt the support coming from so many places, and in so many different forms – from thoughtful hampers to heartfelt messages. They all mean the world to me and I really mean that. If this means that I get a whole second round of lovely messages and hampers next week, so be it. I am a true martyr, I know.

Me and My Brother Celebrate Finishing Our 5K – 07.07.22

Dealing with Cancer: Support Groups

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Dee, Robbie, Me, Anna: Having Lunch 04.07.22

Support groups are a common recommendation to cancer sufferers. I’ve heard various views from others about them and have a few of my own experiences now. My overall feeling is positive, but it has taken me a little bit of time to find some that felt right for me. Even now, where I feel that I am comfortable with my diagnosis and possible fate, I can find them tough. None of the ones I attend are regular meetings and I have not become part of a group so much. I’ve more found myself joining events, where we all come together and share our experiences in some way. There are a few charities that I am becoming more familiar with which I have found helpful for different reasons.

A few nights ago I participated in the Perkatory event for Elephants and Tea, a not-for-profit based in the United States who support Adolescents and Young Adults (AYA) suffering from cancer. Six of us were asked to read out our Dear Cancer letters on the call – we were all published in their most recent magazine edition, alongside a number of others. As the magazine’s organisers are American, it was scheduled for early evening EDT. That meant that it was at 19:00 for the majority of those on the call. Many of those who joined were audience members, so I’m not sure where they were all joining from, but everyone else who was reading were based in the united states. I was joining at midnight in the UK. I’m not very good at staying awake that late, so I was already forcing my eyes open when the call started and it lasted for an hour and a half. Luckily, the content was all very interesting and there were some fantastic pieces being read out. That made it easier to stay awake, but also harder to fall asleep once the time came. I’d fought through the tired period and was in the deliriously awake phase.

It took me a little while to hear about the AYA community. There are some good charities around that specifically target the group, such as Shine in the UK, and Elephants and Tea in the US. Before I realised that these charities existed, I tried to go to a support group at The Maggie Centre in Manchester. It wasn’t sold as a support group per se, as it was a creative writing course. Its function was to act as a support group, though, utilising creative writing as a means of seeking catharsis, and specifically utilising writing as a means of processing your feelings in front of a group, as it allows you to open up in a less direct way. Seeing as I had created the blog at this point and was starting to do a little bit of creative writing, I thought it would be a good opportunity to both seek support whilst improving a new skill. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite what I thought it would be. Firstly, it wasn’t a ‘course’. Perhaps I should have realised that beforehand, but I didn’t. For some reason, I thought we would be learning skills and techniques for creative writing – how to develop characters, make our plots believable etc. I had built it up to be an actual training course in creative writing, but it wasn’t. That is my own fault for not looking into it enough.

The course was actually more for poetry, but it wasn’t about bettering your poetry necessarily. Our instructor would give us certain prompts and encourage us to talk about our experience through those prompts, but it was all very ‘free flow’. We’d have a few minutes to write about something based on a prompt. Some of it was extremely creative, including the methods used to diversify people’s prompts. For example, in the first game we were asked to choose a number between 1 and 100. Once we had all chosen, we were asked for our number one by one. The woman who ran the group would then refer to her magazine, which had a list of ‘100 Best Tips for Improving Your Life Without Trying’, or something to that effect. Once we had a list of the tips which adhered to the numbers we had chosen, we had 5 minutes to write something based on them. It was a cool idea. Inspiration didn’t rush to me, but I got a few lines together. That aspect of the session I really liked – it was fun to hear what others had written and how they used the prompts to pull out their experience. My main issue with the group slowly revealed itself, however, as I listened to what others had to say.

What I did not realise before the session was that the context of each person’s experience with cancer is extremely important in how useful it can be for you… or that is my opinion, anyway. This group was all people who were either bereaved, with a loved one passing away from cancer, or people in remission, with some even considered to be cured as they had been rid of their cancer for years. Although it was interesting to hear their perspectives, it did not feel particularly helpful to me in this context. At this point, I was a few weeks into chemotherapy and still rather terrified of my diagnosis. There is probably an argument that listening to someone in remission’s views on cancer could be encouraging, but I wasn’t in a place where I was ready to hear it. It was not the poems of the people in remission which troubled me, though, it was the poems from those who were bereaved.

I sat listening to a woman’s poem who had tragically lost her husband to cancer a few years prior. Her poem described the pain she experienced on a daily basis, even years after his passing. She described the emptiness that screamed out from the passenger seat in the car that they had bought together; the nights alone in bed. There was nowhere to hide – I was in a room of strangers, with one reciting to me the way that Anna will likely feel if I do die of cancer, or so I thought. I then started thinking about my family and friends – what would they feel? Her words were like glass shards pressing into my ears. I wanted to cover them and scream just to make it go away. All of my greatest fears were dancing around my head. It wasn’t enough to be scared of my own fate at the hands of my cancer, facing an unknown future containing boundless amounts of personal pain… I now had to imagine how that would impact my loved ones. I tried to tune out but it was impossible. After about 20 minutes of this, my GP called me to discuss a few issues I had been having. I was expecting the call, so had warned the woman leading the session that I’d need to excuse myself at some point. As I left the room to answer the call, I breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank God,” I said to myself as I shut the door behind me, “I can take my mind off my family’s grief and just talk about my stupid deadly cancer.”

The GP was calling me to discuss a recent episode that I had experienced. Just as I had fallen asleep the night before, I’d suddenly bolted awake. Straight away, my mind was in panic mode, but I had no idea why. Nothing I did would relieve it. I paced the room, telling a very tired Anna that I couldn’t settle. I downed water, made my way through a few yoga poses and tried to breath slowly, but none of it worked. Eventually, I grabbed my puppy Lucy and lay in bed hugging her. I woke up with her in my arms at 5am. I must have nodded off. I woke up feeling tired but better. The experience had shaken me and I’d left a voicemail with my GP that morning – this was her returning my call. Despite this being quite a traumatic event, it was a welcome distraction to what I was experiencing in the creative writing course.

The fact is this: the group that surrounds you is important. If you struggle to relate to the experience being beamed at you, it may in fact cause you more distress as opposed to relieving you of any. Hearing the perspective of someone who had been bereaved did not provide me with a useful perspective for where I was at in my journey. It gave me a direct line into one of my biggest fears – that the ones I love most, my family and closest friends, may struggle to get past my death for years, if it comes at the hand of my cancer. Such a perspective served no purpose in my life at that time.

Since then, I have found some use in hearing those words. I have decided that I need to support my family as much as possible whilst I am healthy enough to do so, so they do not reflect on my cancer as evil, immoral, or any other negative adjective. Whatever happens with my cancer happens. If I miraculously live until 70 or die next week, it shouldn’t matter. I’ve had a good life and everyone who cares for me should relish in that. Any sadness they experience is for a good reason, because we cared for each other dearly, made amazing memories together and changed each other’s lives for the better. If that isn’t something to celebrate, then I don’t know what is. It is easy for me to say these things now, and I would struggle to implement them if it was my friend or family going through this, but I’d like to think that I would find a way to over time. I really hope that they do if it comes to that.

Another problem with the group was more physical… they were all very different ages to me. All of them were over 60 years old. That is not always a problem per se, but it does contribute to you feeling that you cannot relate to all of the experiences that they speak of. The same thing can be applied the opposite way around – if a 65 year old attended a support group where all attendees were young cancer sufferers, they may struggle to relate with some of the specific issues being raised. Of course, some issues you can relate to each other over. I attended a few sessions with Pancreatic Cancer UK, and that common link (i.e. the fact that we all had pancreatic cancer) helped to bridge this divide. There were many people on that call who had a very similar experience to me, and it really helped to hear their perspectives. In this session, however, no one had the same cancer as me. The result is another wall forming between you and those around you. It makes you feel like you are in the wrong place and doing the wrong thing. That alienation does little to comfort you.

It doesn’t mean that I can relate to everyone just because they are within a certain number of years from me. In one of the sessions I attended, a man in his 40’s was making an argument that having Myeloma, a cancer of the blood, is hard compared to having a cancer where you have a physical tumour. He stated that not having a single place in the body that you feel you are fighting is difficult and leads to more mental stress. Although I understand his point, I sat feeling a little lost. I wasn’t going to start a debate on a support call, but it seemed an unusual place to raise such an issue, not that I think he shouldn’t raise it if he has it on his mind. I can’t see my tumour and have no physical concept of it really. The only difference is that I moan about my pancreas a lot, whereas I’d imagine he complains about his blood a lot. I actually complain about my blood a lot too, but that’s because nurses constantly want to pull it out of my veins with needles, and I’d rather they wouldn’t. I understood that this was something he clearly felt, though. It isn’t so different to my thinking, when I sit reading pancreatic cancer statistics and feeling like I’d rather have any other cancer in the world. That doesn’t mean that I actually believe those thoughts, though. Cancer may make us more humble in general, but we retain our own superiority complex. Our cancer is the worst, our diagnosis is the most scary, we’re the most lucky if we overcome it and everyone should listen to our story because it is the most interesting. You can’t get rid of a cancer of the ego! Besides, I am the strongest person to ever fight pancreatic cancer; I bet it regrets trying it on with me now.

AYA charities are so important because getting cancer at a younger age is more unusual, though. Since joining a call with Shine, and getting involved with Elephants and Tea, I have felt a much stronger connection to the community. As I sat listening to the other’s reading their Dear Cancer letters, I felt a sense of unity. Even the audience members, many of them faceless avatars sat on a call, were engaging through the chat function. It felt heartwarming and special. That feeling overpowers a lot of the difficulties that I had experienced when attending the session at The Maggie Centre. It isn’t that I related to every single thing that was said on the call, with none of the attendees having the same cancer as me, but the setup just felt more right. It was people in their 20’s, 30’s and 40’s giving their perspective on their cancer. Some were in remission, some still fighting, some were stable.

Perhaps age was more irrelevant than I thought. When I think about the times I’ve felt a benefit from these type of sessions, the biggest factor has been how much I feel that I can relate to the people and the things being said. On the Pancreatic Cancer UK call there were many different ages and I related to all of them. We had similar struggles – the Folforinox chemotherapy, dealing with scary survival statistics and getting our heads around the constant Creon usage. When I joined the Shine call, we spoke about the constant drag that comes with a cancer diagnosis, and how we are always fighting an uphill battle with it. Then on the call with Elephants and Tea, we were united through a common purpose – writing cancer a letter, and exposing ourselves in whatever ways it affected us personally.

My issues with The Maggie Centre group were probably varied. The group already knew each other, so it felt like I was an outsider from the start. If I’d have carried on attending, that would have changed, of course. What would I have to sacrifice to continue attending, though? Hours of listening to perspectives which disturbed me and kept me awake at night… It wouldn’t have been worth it.

The fundamental issue felt that too many people in the group were at a different stage of the journey to me, or didn’t have the right perspective for me. People who are grieving are going through their own hell, full of painful challenges which haunt them, probably in a similar way to how a cancer diagnosis haunts its victim…but that doesn’t mean the journey is comparable. Grieving forces one to be conscious of the finality of death – an unwanted conclusion to someone’s story for those left to contemplate it. In my experience, I have always managed to muster some hope with my cancer. Even when it has felt bleak, I’ve known that I can still beat the odds. One day I may have to deal with a more final warning from an oncologist – but even then, I can attend clinical trials, keep running, getting myself to the gym and spending time with my loved ones. There is still a life to live so long as I am capable of pulling air into my lungs and I open my eyes every morning. Death does not provide that same comfort, but it does provide a different sort of comfort… a reassurance that their pain is over and a subtle reminder that billions have suffered the same fate, and we will continue to do so.

Even with me finding some support group-type activities which work better for me, I still think that they take a lot out of me. I’m sure that this is another thing of personal preference, but my experience tells me that it is tiring to do these things too often. Having a shared experience, hearing others utter things you have thought and said, is a powerful thing, but it doesn’t relieve you of those feelings. That sense of community is amazing and has its place in my personal struggle. It is still hard to listen to other people’s trauma and pain. For me, I need space to try and live as normal a life as I can under the circumstances. That is the best therapy for me. Sitting around with friends laughing, getting to the gym and playing with my dog Lucy are all amazingly therapeutic for me. After all, I am not just Pancreatic Dan the Cancer Man, I am Dan the runner, Dan the sausage dog owner, Dan the brother etc. My life isn’t my cancer, no matter how much it dominates my time and energy. I know people who refuse to attend any kind of sessions about cancer, and others who have thrown themselves into things like group sessions. They certainly have a place in my life, and I like to dedicate my time to them, but I don’t like to throw myself into them weekly. I still haven’t established quite how often that I think they most benefit me, but I know that I need a little time to unwind after them, even if I leave them feeling positive and happy. The AYA charities are helping me find sessions which do benefit me in a unique way, and I can’t wait to attend more of them in the future… especially if I get to read out a piece I have written, like I did at the Elephants and Tea Perkatory event. Me me me me me!

WeightWatchers, The Antithesis

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The Road to Recovery

2015 – The Weight Training Days; My Head Looks Tiny

How long does it take to put on weight? Is 8 days enough time to put on considerable weight, or is there a significant delay between eating the fatty foods and putting on the body fat? These are the questions bouncing around my head as I stand on the scales this Thursday morning to see that I have lost 2 kgs since yesterday morning. Apparently, the 5 flapjacks, 3 slices of banana bread, full-fat milk and peanut butter protein shake, abundant cheese on toast lunch and peanut noodle dinner just didn’t cut it. I thought I’d had a good day of putting on weight yesterday. The scales disagreed.

My weight started at 75.45kg as I checked it on Wednesday morning. It was time to start bulking before the big operation, just as the dietician had ordered. The challenge was clear – eat as much as you can, as often as you can. If you look at the packet and see a red colour in the ‘saturated fat’ box, eat twice as much of it. Fruit is fine, just dip it in butter first. Strawberries and cream? Throw those strawberries in the bin and double the cream. Double the double cream. Do they do quadruple cream? Who cares, make your own by combining two tubs of double cream! Put down that banana and eat more chocolate. Why are you crying? Most people would kill to be in this position.

I have major surgery on July 8th. At my pre-surgery appointment with the dietician, she advised me to indulge in all the foods I’d usually limit in preparation for the surgery. I will be losing a lot of body weight afterwards, so the additional weight will help me over the next few weeks. She also advised me to start strength training in addition to my running as it would help me recover faster. The resulting equation makes me think of those videos that you see of athletes’ diets, where they need to take on 8,000 calories a day to maintain their training schedule. The most infamous one I can think of is the US swimmer Michael Phelps diet where he was trying to take on 8,000 to 10,000 a day during training. I’m not comparing myself to him of course, I could never eat that many calories in one day (apparently); I could easily match his world-record swimming times, though.

This morning, as I prepared myself to step onto those scales again, I had a satisfying feeling running through my body. “I ate so many buttery things yesterday,” I thought to myself, “I’m going to weigh so much today.” As I took my place on my pedestal, ready to accept my ‘greatest gainer’ award, I watched the numbers bounce around. Eventually they settled on a number that I wasn’t expecting. 73.3kg. I’d lost 2kgs.. Well, damn it. I’m sure your weight does vary a lot based on how much water you have drank, how much food you are processing at the time etc, but this still felt disappointing. I’ve never felt so disappointed at losing weight; I’ve rarely felt anything about weight. I’ve never weighed myself consistently enough to care.

The truth is, I’ve never paid much attention to my weight. I’ve always exercised enough that it hasn’t been a problem. My family also seem to benefit from good metabolisms, as far as I can tell. We’re all quite skinny, but everyone does also exercise a good amount. We were brought up seeing my parents being active. It’s always been the way with us – you need to keep fit enough that you can eat an obscene amount of cake and feel absolved in doing so. I watch my dad do it every day, although he has slowed down on the exercise now he is in his mid 60s; the cake eating is going as well as ever.

When I was 16, exercise was all about weight training. The only cardiovascular exercise I did was when playing squash. This continued until I was about 22. I then started to commit myself more to running, cycling and other, more cardiovascular-focused activities. The dopamine hit was getting addictive and I didn’t care so much about having a muscular physique. My main objective was to look good when I was weight training, but I was realising that feeling good was a much more attractive prospect. Cardio made me feel much better than weight training. I clung on to the weight training for another few years, not wanting to lose too much of my muscle mass after so many years of hard work, before throwing in the towel completely when I entered my first marathon. Run run run – that was my new life. Harnessing my inner Forrest Gump, I decided that the running life was for me.

It was a few years later, in 2019, that I started to weight train again. I was living in Philadelphia in an apartment paid for by the company. There was a gym in the building. It wasn’t amazing, but it was right on my doorstep. Closer, actually. It was in my basement, just an elevator ride away. I felt like my running was stagnating and I couldn’t figure out why. The training was brutal – 6 days a week, 45 miles or more total distance – but I always did it. After doing some research online, I’d read that strength training is an essential part in improving your running. That convinced me to figure out a new strength routine and make room for it in my busy workout schedule. I’d get up at 6am to go to the gym, or I’d finish my run in the basement. It was nice to be back to the weight training with a different purpose beyond getting ‘buff’. I was using lower weights and doing more body-balance type exercises.

When covid struck and I was brought back from the US, I didn’t bother joining a gym. They weren’t open for a few months because of the lockdowns anyway. Running was still a staple in my schedule, as I was now training for the 100-mile GB ultra, which I was due to do with my brother, Greg. I randomly ran a marathon one Saturday as part of my training. I felt like I was fitter than ever. All that running took its toll, though, and I sustained a knee injury. After seeing a physio, I discovered that it was caused by an imbalance in hip strength. The strength training was back in the fold and I had a plan drawn up by the physio of home-friendly workouts. One of the exercises required me to fill a backpack with books and do one-legged squats… only in the pandemic would you find me filling a bag with books and using the lounge furniture as an exercise bench. What a novel time that was!

It was around this time that I discovered yoga. Once my injury was better, I relied on yoga to keep my muscles in good shape. The strength training was gone, but the yoga improved flexibility and ensured that blood was flowing to those tight places. I was always finding excuses to get rid of the strength training again – it felt like old ground to me and I had done nothing but that for years when I was younger. Yoga and running were now my staples and remained so until I fell ill, ceasing all physical activity until a few cycles into chemotherapy, when I realised that I could still run. It’s been tough but I’ve managed to achieve some consistency these days. Towards the end of chemotherapy, it got very difficult, but I do around 3 or 4 days running a week now, even if it is mostly 5Ks.

On Wednesday, I signed up for the gym across from my parent’s house. It is a small gym, located above a few shops and accessible by a door around the side of them. You make your way up a staircase to access the gym. It is actually the first gym I ever went to when I was about 14. It has changed hands now, has been refurbished and is open 24 hours a day, accessible with a fob. As I walked around it on Wednesday after being inducted, it felt strange. I’d spent so much time in there when I was younger. I remember watching a particular developed guy that was in my year at school doing the max weight on the chest press machine when I was younger, and wondering how on earth he could do such a thing. It was amazing to me. There were about 8 people standing around him watching him do it. It was impressive for a 14-year-old. My dad used to participate in a competition on the rowing machines – who could row 2500m the fastest. He was top of the leaderboard, despite some of the other competitors being nearly half his age. It made him proud. I’d done it a few times with him, but it wasn’t for me.

After going to the gym on Wednesday, I then went running with my friend, Finch. I only did 5K. My legs felt like jelly for the initial 10 minutes after doing squats for the first time in 2 years. Perhaps that is why my weight was so low this morning – your muscles have to break down before they build back stronger, right?

Maybe I should be lowering the amount of exercise I am doing. It feels so unnatural to me to just cram calories and not balance it out with more work, though. I’ve never been a fan of eating for the sake of eating. I know that this is different as I have a good reason to do so, but I can’t figure out what the right balance is. The thought of eating so much high-calorie food and not countering it with some sort of exercise just doesn’t seem natural to me. Usually, I’d do a long run which would allow me to eat anything and everything in sight. Burning calories is the mechanism which permits me to take more on. I’m doing that to an extent, but I’m not used to watching my weight so closely in the process. Perhaps I’m overthinking it all. I know that I have stepped up the amount I’m eating the past few days. Surely that will result in me gaining weight eventully. Tuesday night I made a mushroom and miso risotto. Piling my plate up higher than ever, I thought I was excited to eat it. By the end, I had to go to bed early because it made me feel so sick. I’d overdone it. That day I had been out for lunch too – I even got a dessert in the middle of the day. What luxury!

So, at around 11am today, I made my way over to the gym again, feeling more determined than ever after my disagreement with the scales that morning. As I left, I saw a bee struggling on the floor. It was on its side and only occasionally moving its legs. I remember seeing on the news that if you see a bee in this state, they probably need some energy. My mind considered just leaving it be – the nature documentary approach – what happens in nature, happens, and who am I to play God with it. I couldn’t do it; God is in my name afterall. I ran back into the house, stirred some sugar into water in a small glass, then went outside and trickled it next to the bee. Satisfied that I had tried to do something (which was better than nothing), I proceeded to the gym. There was a woman outside smoking. I made my way up the stairs and into the weights room, deciding to start with a few back exercises before moving on to working on my chest. Then I’d do legs, before finishing on arms. Easy.

Halfway through my routine, I walked into the cardio room to get some more water. The woman who had been outside smoking was sitting on the exercise bike, leisurely turning the pedals and watching videos on her phone. “She’d be better than me at putting on weight,” I thought to myself. Has there ever been a stranger brand of jealousy? Stop it, Dan. Bitterness won’t increase your weight. Your judging someone on silly things anyway – all of the professional footballers used to smoke 50 years ago and they were healthy. Not as healthy as the ones who didn’t smoke, but you know what I mean. The doctors were probably still recommending smoking at that time, stating it helps you to lose weight; maybe it does help you lose weight… Good job I don’t smoke. I’d be eating my cigarettes now if I did.

I was in the gym for about 50 minutes. As I walked up the drive when I got home, I remembered about the bee I had attempted to revive. The bee was standing upright now and there were ants everywhere, including one standing on its back. An unconsidered and unwanted result of pouring sugary water on the floor was that the ants were now having a field day. They seemed to be mostly leaving the bee alone, at least. The bee was using its legs to wipe its face. It seemed to have more energy than earlier but it still wasn’t flying off. I tried to poke it a bit, but that didn’t seem especially helpful. My David Attenborough moment was here. Although I want the bee to live, it was beyond my control. I stood up and wished it well, before making my way inside. It was time to eat again; I didn’t feel excited.

Prescribing Pizza

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The Road to Recovery

Lucy Begging for Creon

Another day, another appointment. Today it was with one of the dieticians at Manchester Royal Infirmary (MRI). It was extremely useful and I recommend to anyone who has a Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary (HPB) disease, such as Pancreatic Cancer, to get in touch with a dietician from their hospital as early on in the treatment process as possible. I feel like I have had drips of information from other parts of my treatment, but nothing like the level of help that I received today. A lot of the strategies and knowledge I have utilised so far have come from research that I have done myself, or through discussions with other cancer sufferers. There was a really useful call that I joined with Pancreatic Cancer UK which lay out the fundamentals of Creon and why I need to take it, but that was a group call; having a 1-2-1 with a dietician allows you to dig deeper into the specifics of your individual case. No two cases of cancer are exactly the same after all.

Not only did I learn more about diet whilst suffering from pancreatic cancer generally, but I also learned a lot about diet when approaching a major surgery. Want to know the good news or the bad news first? Let’s get the bad news out of the way first… My assumption that getting as healthy as possible before surgery, by eating healthy foods and losing some weight, was totally wrong. Solid stuff, Dan – typical know it all idiot deciding that you know everything about the world and jumping to conclusions.

It turns out that the average person who has had a Whipple procedure will lose about 10% of their body weight post-surgery. That means that you want to put on weight before surgery to try to minimise the impact that this has on your body. Even if you are not having a Whipple, you will still lose weight after a major surgery due to the abundance of drugs and suffering appetite during recovery. Of course, I am assuming that you are a healthy weight before surgery; if you are overweight, I don’t think the advice would be the same. Then again, I’m not sure – I’ve had a single meeting with a dietician, so you probably want to take everything I say with a pinch of salt (and a whole trough of full-fat cream if you are trying to pile on weight before your own Whipple procedure, like I now am).

The good news is that I now get to eat whatever I want for a few weeks! Success! I’ve been encouraged to give away absolutely none of the cakes I bake and to eat them all myself. I essentially have a doctors note telling me that I NEED to eat as many calories as possible. Not only that, but I was given a leaflet which instructs me to eat pizza, cheese and crackers and fatty snacks like scones. It’s unusual to find myself praising surgery or cancer, but I have to give them both a tip of the hat here. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard medical professionals advising me to eat pizza; it feels like a trap.

My goal is now to turn up to the surgery, step onto the scales, and see the nurse’s eyes widen as she records my weight. “Two seconds sir, I just need to check something with the doctors,” she says, trying to hide the panic in her face. I’d stand there with a smug smile smudged across my face. Next thing I see is the doctor running around the corner – “Hello Daniel. It appears your weight has doubled in 10 days – how on earth did you manage such a feat?” He’d ask. I’d proudly reply “I started to blend scones and cream together to drink alongside my 16″ pizzas… and that is just my breakfast routine.” They’d praise my ingenuity before informing me that they can no longer proceed with surgery as I have eaten myself out of qualification… you win some you lose some, I guess.

In my case, though, I have been warned that I am unlikely to have a Whipple procedure. Due to where my tumour is, at the head of the pancreas and surrounding a major artery, it is unlikely that it will be possible. The fact that the pancreas is already in a difficult place to operate on, alongside the fact that the tumour is in an awkward position on my awkward pancreas, means it is near impossible to operate on in a conventional way (conventional being the Whipple procedure, which is anything but conventional; it essentially involves removing various organs from the digestive tract before attaching it back together in a new order). Further to this, today I learned that having a tumour in the head of the pancreas is more damaging than having one in the tail as the head is where the main pancreatic activity is; it is the part of the organ which produces insulin, as well as the part which creates the enzymes that break down fats. A tumour in the head of the pancreas may also physically block the enzymes from getting into the stomach.

I’ve tried to explain it all a little better in the following paragraph, which I wrote over a long period of time and with great effort. I ensured I did plenty of research before writing it, and am confident that it clearly demonstrates the functions of the pancreas, and why having a tumour in the head of the pancreas is so damaging to your body. Not only does it clearly demonstrate these things, but it does so in a way that the layman can understand, like you and I. Whether the mainstream medical journals choose to praise me for achieving what they never could, is up to them; if it is too edgy then so be it, not everyone can take my raw and direct approach.

The reason that the Whipple procedure is so difficult is because your stupid pancreas is behind your stupid stomach, so it is already hard to operate on in stupid surgery. The pancreas produces stupid insulin to control your stupid blood-sugar levels in your stupid body, but it also creates stupid enzymes which help break down stupid fats in your stupid stomach. When you have a stupid tumour in the stupid head of the stupid pancreas, it disrupts all of this stupid activity because the stupid head of the stupid pancreas is the part which is stupidly responsible for producing and releasing these stupid enzymes and stupid insulin. That means that if you have a stupid tumour in the stupid head of your stupid pancreas then your stupid body starts struggling to supply the stupid enzymes to the stupid stomach which help it in breaking down the stupid fats. That is why stupid Creon, a stupid tablet that you have to take a stupid amount of with meals, is so stupidly necessary when you have a stupid tumour in the head of your stupid pancreas. Further to all of this, the individual who stupidly allowed a stupid tumour to grow in the head of the stupid pancreas has an increased chance of developing stupid diabetes because of the stupid pancreas not producing enough stupid insulin anymore. Capiche? Good. Glad I got that off my chest. Probably some of my best writing, if I may be so bold.

Seeing as a Whipple procedure is so unlikely in my case, you may be wondering why they are going to be slicing my entire abdomen open and spending hours operating on me. This is where Irreversible Electroporation (IRE), also known as NanoKnife, comes into play. I’m not sure why it has two names, which seem to introduce it as two quite different things, at least linguistically. Irreversible Electroportation makes it sound technical and cutting edge. NanoKnife makes it sound like the surgeon requests the extra small knife for this part of the procedure, before grasping it with the thumb and finger and delicately shaving the tumour away. Although the second is far more entertaining to imagine, I believe that the first far better describes the technique. A small electric shock is applied to the tumour, attempting to kill the cells. Its success in treating pancreatic cancer is little documented and not really understood, so we are in “uncharted waters,” to quote the surgeon in my first meeting with him. They do not commonly agree to do a major operation, only to use an experimental form of treatment with little documentation over whether it is likely to improve the situation or not. The treatment does seem to have good results with prostate cancer, though, so I really am positive that it is a good alternative if a Whipple cannot be done.

What I don’t like is the use of the word ‘Irreversible’. I can’t think of many medical contexts where you want to hear the word ‘irreversible’ used. Perhaps if there was a procedure called ‘Irreversible Cancer Killer’ which irreversibly killed all cancer cells in your body, I’d be on board. I haven’t heard of such a procedure, though. In this case, the word ‘irreversible’ just makes me think that I’ll be sat in a meeting in 5 months time, reviewing a new batch of scans of my pancreas. As the doctor explains to me that the electric shocks have irreversibly damaged my pancreas, I’ll sit with a confused look on my face. “I thought this was meant to help? Is there nothing you can do?” The doctor then smugly laughs and says to me, “I’m sorry Daniel, do you understand the definition of irreversible? The clue is really in the name.” I absolutely do not believe any of my oncologists would speak to me like this, but it is fun to have a bad guy in a story. I hope none of them read this blog… Who am I kidding, they’re far too busy to read this nonsense.

Anyway, this all relates to diet because a Whipple procedure takes a lot longer to recover from. The dietician told me that they make three new ‘joins’ in your digestive tract when doing a Whipple. I’m pretty sure I cringed when I heard her say the word ‘joins’ in relation to my digestive tract; it makes me view my abdomen as a kitchen sink, and the surgeon as a plumber rearranging the pipes. There’s something disturbing about it. I don’t like it. Those new joins make digesting food difficult for a long time, as the area is tender.

The nurse told me that a Whipple procedure would probably take 2 – 3 months recovery to even be eating normally again. NanoKnife would be considerably less than this. When I asked the anaesthetist yesterday how long I’d have to wait to find out which procedure they had done after waking up, she told me to check the time on my phone once I’m awake and sitting up. “If it’s 18:00 or later – they’ve done a Whipple.” I guess I’ll be waking up and grabbing my phone straight away, like the modern-day millennial I am. The nurses will probably think I’m Twitter-mad or something.

I know that in reality, it does not matter, though. The surgeons don’t know what they are doing yet; it is all about what they see when they open me up and what is deemed possible. Either way, I’ll wake up and will be forced to deal with the consequences. I need to let go of wanting to understand both scenarios and how awful they may be for me in terms of recovery. What I need to focus on is what the dietician told me to do before the surgery – do more strength training in the gym, keep up the running, and EAT EAT EAT! Alongside this, I need to keep good dental hygiene; this is to try and prevent myself from getting any chest infections or bugs during or after treatment. Apparently, most of these bugs are transmitted from your mouth, so the better your oral health, the less likely you are to develop any of these issues.

I also learned a little more about Creon use. The nurse seemed to mostly praise my use of Creon but did tell me a few useful things. Mainly that you should only be taking Creon when there is food in your stomach; taking any before or after is pointless. You should take your first one just after starting to eat, and your last one just before the last few mouthfuls. Alongside this, if you suffer from acid reflux, you need to have an anti-acid prescribed to you to ensure that the capsules travel through your body without the enzymes being damaged. I suffer from acid reflux badly, so this is a key problem for me. I have Omeprazole prescribed to help with this issue, but my GP in Alsager, my home town, keep saying that it is not on a repeat prescription, despite being on my medication list whenever I pick up prescriptions from there… very unusual. The dietician said she would send them a letter and resolve this issue. Another reason to see the dietician as early as possible – they get shit done (or mine did, at least)!

So, another day and another meeting at MRI. Today’s was good. I left it feeling positive. It is good to learn new things about managing your cancer better and I felt empowered by the whole process. Any directorate to eat everything you want is good in my book – I’m going to go baking mad and not feel any guilt for any of it, not that I felt that much guilt anyway. I just didn’t eat too much of it myself before. That’s about to change…

Lastly, as I finished writing this post, I saw a headline on my phone stating that Dame Deborah James has died at the age of 40. She was truly defiant in the face of her diagnosis, raising millions of pounds for charity and raising awareness, with courage, wit and openness. The image of a beautiful woman fighting a deadly cancer is powerful in itself, disbanding the common idea that cancer sufferers are older, weaker and frailer than the rest of society. It surprises people to learn that I have stage 3 pancreatic cancer, and although I am charmed by these remarks, they demonstrate the fact that many expect your cancer to be visible; they expect you to be worn down by it. Of course, there comes a point where the cancer will get the better of you if you cannot get rid of it, and you will change physically, as anyone does when they near their end. Life is not infinite, though. We fight to stay with our families, friends and loved ones, but we grow ever more aware that the fight may be in vain. Deborah chose to use her position for good, channelling tremendous energy into that fight, as well as the one against her cancer. I’m sure both fed into the other, making her an even stronger person. She’s an inspiration to me as I write these blog posts, and knowing that she was originally a cancer blogger makes her even more inspiring.

Rest in peace, Deborah. Your suffering is over now; I hope that your loved ones take some comfort in that fact. I know I’d want mine to.

Pre-Operation Probe

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The Road to Recovery

Baking Bread – The New Morning Routine

The past few days have flown by and I’ve barely been cognisant of how long it has been since I last posted. This morning I checked and saw that five days had passed. Readers may believe that I’ve been in a paralysed state, terrified of surgery and cowering from the outside world, too stressed to interact with it. Thankfully, the opposite is true. I’ve been overindulging in plans, getting out of the house and keeping myself busy. I’ve seen a lot of friends and family and had a lovely few days. Particularly inspiring was my friend Flo’s speech at a University of Bath Alumni event. Last year, she rowed across the Atlantic with two of her friends, becoming the youngest female team to ever complete the 60-day journey. Her speech was centred around the theme of ‘opportunities’ and taking them. It was extremely inspiring and even included some embarrassing pictures of us from university on the screen. Larissa and I were giggling as they flashed up behind Flo whilst she spoke. But today is Monday, and Monday demands a return to normality; a banging drum that reminds you of the seven-day cycle to which you must adhere. When the weekend’s potential is spent, you are forced to readdress whatever is sitting on your to-do list.

Larrisa, Me, Flo at the Bath Event

I woke up with a few things on my to-do list today. Bake bread, fill in the online questionnaire for my pre-op appointment at Manchester Royal Infirmary (MRI), attend the appointment at MRI and, of course, finally write another damn blog post. It isn’t necessarily in that order of importance, but it is in the order of service. As I write this, at 11:50am, I have left the bread to prove for the final time before going into the oven, have baked some ginger biscuits and have filled in the online questionnaire for the hospital appointment. No doubt I’ll have to come back to this post and continue writing several times over the day, making editing it a labyrinth of differing tenses, incorrect assumptions and interesting events which demand inclusion after the fact. That’s fine, though. I guess the game for the readers is to spot these things now – a sort of ‘Where’s Wally? Ebb and Flow’ edition, where you’re on the lookout for grammatical and contextual inconsistencies as opposed to a man in a red and white striped top.

Ginger Biscuits

My family and friends have come together well in response to the news of the surgery. Mostly. There has been the odd moment where I sense someone is more upset than they’re letting on, or where I feel a little let-down at the lack of support, but these things are quite normal I find. Besides, when I feel let down, I recognise that more as me demanding more from someone than they are perhaps able or willing to give at that time. That helps me move past those thoughts. It is much better to make a beast of yourself and never rely on anyone else for any support, ever. Of course, I am being facetious, but you do have to become thick-skinned when dealing with cancer. No matter how supportive your network is, they can’t be there all of the time. You still find yourself laying in bed at 5am, unable to sleep and frustrated with the world. Those are the moments where you feel most alone and your ability to cope is really tested. Mine is standing up to scrutiny so far. The only time I have cried since finding out about the surgery was when I was trying to comfort my brother Greg on the phone, only to spiral off on a tangent and spit out sentence after sentence of doom-speak. Perhaps I needed that; I’ve felt very positive ever since. I am frequently waking up at 5:00, which is annoying.

The appointment at the hospital was at 14:30. I wasn’t really sure what a pre-op appointment would consist of. There are a few things that I could have guessed would occur – at least one blood test (they never let you out of the hospital without taking some of that red gold from your veins when you have cancer), a long questionnaire and at least one thing that I didn’t expect but that is very uncomfortable. Guess what, it offered up all three. My favourite kind of hospital day.

First up was the questionnaire. Considering my surgery is a major one that may last from 9:00 until 18:00 in the evening, I don’t mind answering a long list of questions. It is probably required more than ever. I’m hopeful that I’ll be under every type of drug available to man which will make the experience more pleasant for me; if I have to answer 5000 questions to make that possible, then so be it. I’ll talk to you about the inner workings of every bowel movement if it grants me the top tier of pain relief. Hell, I’ll let you observe me on the toilet and then study the result with you if it’ll convince you that I can withstand 5kgs of ketamine and a couple of barrels of general anaesthetic.

It was during this questionnaire that the uncomfortable moment revealed itself. “Have you been admitted to hospital in the last twelve months?” The nurse asked me. I responded by telling her that I had been admitted to King’s College after my diagnosis, as I needed a stent installed in my bile duct. That is where she warned me that things were about to get a bit ‘unusual’.

She went to a medical trolley which sat in the corner of the room and opened up a drawer. Out of that drawer, she pulled a sealed plastic bag. Inside was a double-pronged cotton bud with a very long plastic stick to hold. There was then a long plastic tube which the cotton bud could be screwed into. “You need to insert this into your anus until there are faeces on the end of it. It’s to detect a bug that you may have picked up whilst in hospital.” I broke out laughing almost immediately. It was funny as I had just done a swab on my inner thigh and said to her “it’s quite a weird sensation rubbing a cotton bud there – you don’t often feel things in the crease between your leg and your thigh,” to which she had replied, “it may be getting weirder after this next question!” She was right – it was weirder than rubbing your thigh.

I’m not going into too much more detail about what happened afterwards, but you can see why I had bowels on my mind during that previous paragraph. What I will say is this, pushing something into your bum for the first time is a little disconcerting. A part of me wanted to go back and ask the nurse to help me, but I thought that might be a little awkward. She didn’t extend any offers when she told me the task at hand. I’m assuming that she may have done that when she was young and naive, only learning through experience that by offering you do in fact have to assist if they call your bluff. I would have been calling her bluff. I thought about asking my fiancee Anna to come and have a go. That has the potential to kill the relationship, though. “Hey honey, can you push this far enough into my anus so that a little bit of faeces is visible on the end?” There isn’t really a way to ask that question without it killing a little bit of your relationship at least. My mum was with her in the waiting room too – it might be a little embarrassing to broach the question with her there. I’m now writing it on a blog that many of my own family and my fiancee’s family read so I guess I’m not actually that embarrassed about it all. It’s knowledge sharing, Dan; someone else might be reading this in anticipation of their own pre-op. Just keep telling yourself that. That makes it way less weird that you’re writing this on the internet to be consumed by anyone, including your own colleagues.

The rest of the survey was pretty dry. The nurse had a nice and dry English humour about her. That makes it better. She sent me back to the waiting room and told me that I’d shortly be called to do bloods and an ECG. I was also told that once my bloods are done, I will have an opportunity to meet with an anaesthetist to talk about that side of the procedure in more detail. After returning to the waiting room for about five minutes, I was called into the bloods office.

Bloods were pretty normal. Me sitting there clenching my arm, pointing out that I have a scar on my vein from the number of times I’ve been stabbed in it. The nurse also had a dry sense of humour – perhaps working in a highly stressful environment, full of intense emotion and anxiety leads one to blunt their emotions and actively seek humour, wherever they may extract it from a situation? Just a thought. The true extent of this humour didn’t come out until the ECG. “Take your top off then, let’s have a look at you,” she said. I warned her that I had a lot of tattoos; she told me that she was still married. As I lay on the bed with her attaching stickers all over my body, I started to discuss where the incision may be on my stomach. I have a tattoo of a man dangling from a star in the middle of my abdomen, starting just below my chest and finishing just above my belly button. I told the nurse that I’d been wondering where the incision would interrupt the tattoo – whether it would mercilessly kill the man directly, or whether it would cut off the rope which we assume is sparing his life. She told me she wasn’t sure. I told her that it probably didn’t matter either way, as he’d be dead whether it was him or the rope that was cut. I think I’d reached the boundary of her humour with a patient – she probably thought I was sympathising with the tattoo a little too much for it to not be a projection of what I assume would happen to me during surgery. I really did just think it was a funny concept; it’s one of my favourite tattoos and it’s being ruined – I have to find the humour in it somehow.

The Tattoo on My Abdomen

Back to the waiting room in anticipation of the meeting with the anaesthetist. Anna pointed out that they are some of the smartest people in the medical profession as they constantly have to keep calculations in their heads; I still question this. If an accountant does not have to do any adding or taking away without a calculator, why would an anaesthetist have to figure a lot of important information out in their head? I wasn’t buying that. I’m sure they are extremely intelligent people, though. What I really want them to be is incredibly liberal. That is far more advantageous for me. Drugs, drugs, drugs. I want them to feed me so many drugs that I wake up in 2031 when they have finally found the cure for cancer and are administering it directly into my brain, toe or elbow; wherever they have to stick the damn thing to get rid of it.

Another five minutes or so and we were called in. I have to give it to Anna – this woman did have an aura of intelligence about her. What she was saying, however, was less impressive. I sat there as she described how I’d have a drain in my body, how I’ll likely have a line in my neck, and how I might need an epidural. I’m not sure what my face looked like as she was speaking, but I’m pretty sure there was a blatant look of concern slowly forming in my expression. There were so many words that I did not want to be hearing in relation to my body. Even the whole “if we need to give you a blood transfusion, are you ok with that?” thing is a little bit much for me – I immediately just imagine bags of blood and want to throw up. Maybe all the blood that I’ve been giving to the hospital will benefit me in the end, when they give me a load of it back to try to save my life after an operation… hopefully that won’t be necessary, though. I know that they don’t really keep your blood after blood tests by the way, but it’s fun to imagine the staff constantly adding it to a large oil carton with a ‘Dan Godley’ label on the side.

I left the conversation with the anaesthetist feeling more queasy and anxious than I’ve felt in a while. It was a healthy dose of reality – that this is really happening, that it is really complex and that it is actually happening soon. 9:00 until 18:00 – that’s more than the average work day. I don’t even wake up feeling well-rested afterwards. The anaesthetist warned me that I’d be very tired for a week or so. That was probably underselling what the worst of recovery is. I haven’t heard many who have come out of major surgery only complaining of how tired they are, but I guess I’ll be finding that out the hard way.

And that was that – the pre-op was done. Assuming that I don’t fail any blood tests or get told that I have one of these bugs from my previous hospital visits, I should be good. Tomorrow I’m back at MRI for a meeting with the dietician team. Hopefully, they won’t require me to put anything in my anus, but I won’t assume too much. You can never be sure what might happen with these appointments; once upon a time, I went to A&E expecting to be home at an annoyingly late time but with my abdominal pain sorted – that meeting spiralled into 5 weeks of uncertainty before receiving a cancer diagnosis. You never know what life will throw at you, but you start to get an idea when you still find yourself frequenting hospitals eight months later… sometimes you get told you have cancer, sometimes you stick a swab into your anus, and sometimes you probably do both. At least those things were eight months apart for me.