Life After Cancer

19th April 202320th April 2023 godley93Cancer, Health, Hospital, Lifestyle, Pancreatic Cancer, Surgery, Treatment12 Comments

It’s been a minute…

The monthly subscription fee for WordPress has been coming out of my account every month. I usually open the notification from my bank when it appears on the home screen of my phone, and greet it with disdain as it torments me – a subtle reminder of how little I’ve been writing; I haven’t written for the blog at all. At least I am paying WordPress for the privledge.

My original excuse to myself was that I needed some space from it all. When you’re embroiled in a struggle against cancer, chemotherapy, recovery from surgery, you don’t find a lot of room for anything else. Similar to when you go and see a film in the cinema and you get lost in that dark room; when you leave, you almost feel shocked that people are walking the streets and driving their cars, going about their normal lives. Was I the only person locked away in that dark room? Did the world not suspend itself until I re-emerged 3 hours later? It should have. Nothing means anything if someone is not there to perceive it, and I, as the protagonist in this world, am the only thing that matters – right? Wrong.

I’ve spent a few months getting back into the swing of having a normal life. I say normal, I’ve still found myself rushing to A&E in an Uber, then painting the pavement outside of the hospital with my own vomit approximately 0.1 seconds after closing its door. Not necessarily normal, but that is my new normal. Since my operation, I’ve learnt that I have a large buildup of scar tissue in my bowel which occasionally causes the bowel to get blocked, or twisted during the process of digestion. It has led to me being admitted to the hospital about 3 times since my operation. One of these times I have already written about on this blog. The most recent one was the worst experience of them all. I was walking my dog in the park after going to the gym that morning when I started getting a stabbing pain in my groin. After cutting the walk short and returning to my flat, I spent about an hour moving between positions on the sofa, trying to find one that helped subside the pain. Nothing did.

Anna and I turned the flat over trying to find the liquid morphine that I was prescribed a couple of months ago to help with the more intense bouts of pain. We couldn’t find it; we still haven’t. Instead, I found some opioid tablets in my vast chest of medication (it is actually a hamper box that we received last Christmas, but ‘chest’ is a more satisfying description). I threw them back. They kicked my brain off kilter just enough to allow me to drift into a sleep for 45 minutes. When I woke up, the pain was angry. It had gained traction since I slipped off to sleep, and now the stab had graduated into a deep twisting pain throughout the left side of my groin. I pushed my fingers into the spot, trying to relieve it any way I could, but it didn’t do anything. Crying out in pain and struggling to breathe, we decided that we needed to go to hospital. I threw up, then the Uber arrived. 15 minutes later, I was throwing up outside the hospital, before being ferried in on a wheelchair. I must have thrown up another 6 times over the course of the next hour.

I spent 2 days in hospital and was barely conscious of any of it; morphine is a wicked mistress, but damn does it do a good job under such circumstances. I had a tube shoved up my nose and into my stomach, which kept me company for 30 hours. They kept mentioning the possibility of emergency surgery, depending on whether the issue started to subside on it’s own or not. No food. No water. No resolution. They let me go and said it might happen every few months; apparently, more surgery can just result in more scar tissue forming, so they only do it when the patient’s life is in serious threat. I think death would have been easier; the whole thing was terrible.

There’s a strange dichotomy in life after cancer. Reflecting on the months of chemotherapy, when I wasn’t sure if it would do enough to save my life, I actually think I was really happy. The diagnosis had given me so much perspective on what was amazing in my life. Every moment was beautiful in one way or another. Now, it feels like I am battling a veneer that sits between myself and my ability to be happy at all.

I’ve been reading Rob Delaney’s book A Heart That Works. It is about how his 2 year old son died of a brain tumour. In it, he says that he doesn’t feel comfortable around people that haven’t had some form of extreme trauma in their life. It really struck a chord with me this time around (I’ve read the book before, but I did so in a single afternoon and I could barely make sense of the words through the endless stream of tears that were forcing their way out of my eyes). I’ve found myself listening to someone complain about something, but struggling to process their problem. All that happens in my head is a voice starts saying to me “you’re going to fucking die anyway; why are you even bothering having friends at all.” I’m being a little tongue-in-cheek there, but it isn’t miles from the truth.

I don’t understand how I can be so unhappy now, when the prospect of living is actually a very real and plausible possibility, yet I was so happy in those months of brutal uncertainty. It makes me feel selfish that I can’t be more grateful for the chance I’ve been given, but I know it is more complex than that. I hear people complaining to each other that they feel hungover, or how they hate Sundays; it bores me to my core. I feel an urge to seek out stories of intense pain and suffering. I find myself listening to more sad music. I think about how the sun is burning hotter and how the universe is doomed to die. It brings me comfort – my experience is futile in comparison. Children get brain tumours at the age of 2 and die, then their parents have to wrestle with the consequences. Why wouldn’t the sun burn hotter; who wants to live in a world like that anyway?

Cancer becomes an unwanted ghoul that rides on your back when you’re apparently clear of it. It has altered everything about me: my physical body has scars, my fingers and toes frequently seize up from cramp out of nowhere, my own mind haunts my every thought. During the results of my last scan at The Christie, the oncologist told me that some of the lymph nodes in the area where the tumour was located are dilated. He said they were not dilated to a point that they are considered a risk, but that we need to keep an eye on them. Ever since hearing those words, I’ve become an expert in lymphoma despite knowing absolutely nothing about it and trying to avoid Googling it at all costs. I’m constantly feeling my neck, cautious that it hurts and worried that I am developing lumps there; I vaguely know that lymphoma can show signs in the neck, so my mind ensures that I have a steady stream of anxiety about it, which seems to manifest as actual pain in my neck. It isn’t all in my mind, I really do feel things around my neck that I never used to, but I don’t know if it is just tension, or me perpetuating my own narrative. Even my chin bone has started to hurt and in one particular spot, I get a sharp pain when I turn my head in a certain way. I don’t understand any of it. It terrifies me.

I get similar feelings around my armpits, but it isn’t as pronounced as the neck pain. Sometimes, I think there’s a lump there too. For some reason, I find it easier to depart from these anxieties, though. Probably because I remember that I have a neck still, then I remember that I’m an expert in lymphoma, and I know that it always undoubtedly shows itself as a pain in the neck, and I remember that I also have a pain in my neck, so I determine that I have lymphoma. Lymphoma of the neck. 1 week to live. I sit in bed until 2:00am and don’t sleep a wink. What will I do with my last days? Fail at writing a book… I’m good at that. On top of this, there is the aforementioned absentness that I feel towards the world around me. I manage to feign interest for a while, and sometimes I actually am interested, but it inevitably gives way to the more difficult thoughts.

I’m working again, which actually brings a lot of relief. It is nice to travel into the office, which I do twice a week. I’ve been reading a lot more, and the journey ensures that I do at least an hour and a half of it on those days. Work gives me a reason to be interacting with people too. We’re talking about this project or that issue, and there is structure to it. It feels useful. My neck stops hurting so much because I’m focused. But then I return home and I feel like I’m a drag around my wife, then I look at my dog Lucy and get worried that she will think that I abandoned her if I did die, and I won’t be able to tell her that I didn’t. Nothing can just be good; I manage to take good things, process them through my negativity-lense, then beam them back in a shade of strident bleak. It pisses me off beyond all measure, and then I get angry at myself for doing it. The spiral continues.

It just feels so inescapable with pancreatic cancer. I have to remind myself that I actually know people who are 2, 3, even 10+ years clear of having the cancer; that it is possible to get there. I just can’t convince myself that it will happen to me. I feel like I’m a sitting duck, waiting for the symptom that turns into the cancer that will kill me. I don’t even have a pancreas anymore. I don’t know what the possibilities are in terms of things that can go wrong, but I’ve read enough stories of people having reoccurrences, of people being 2 years clear and then dying anyway, so I’m already convinced of the outcome.

It’s always been a problem of mine – I’ve obsessed over death in a way that I’m sure many people do, but I’ve felt vindicated beause I’ve then been diagnosed with a deadly cancer at a young age. I remember sitting in the hospital bed after being told of the seriousness of the cancer and thinking to myself “I knew this was going to happen. I always knew it. I didn’t know what it would be, but I knew something would happen.” It is hard to kick that feeling now. But, something else has happened which may be spurring these feelings on.

Recently, another good friend of mine has been diagnosed with cancer. He is even younger than I was when I was diagnosed. Luckily, all the signs are pointing in the right direction. There doesn’t seem to be any spread, and they believe that they have caught it very early, though they can’t confirm this until they have removed the tumour in surgery and done a biopsy on it. I don’t want to say what the cancer is, and I don’t want to give too much information on the story, as it isn’t my place to say, but he is dealing with it incredibly well.

Hearing him talk about the diagnosis – how he felt like it was going to be bad news when he got a call from the hospital saying that he needed to go in for an appointment sooner than planned, how he saw the nurse point him out in the waiting room, how he was the youngest there by a number of decades, not years – felt very familiar. It felt weirdly nice to speak to someone close to me about the disorientation you feel in those meetings – how you’re told not to worry, but are then given a leaflet on dealing with cancer, and are assigned a clinical nurse specialist who will “assist you through the coming weeks and months”. Suddenly, you aren’t a thriving 20-something, you’re a cancer patient. It’s hard to adjust to, but I know he’ll be ok. I sincerely hope that I am too, despite all this talk of death and nihilism.

I was recently the best man at my best friend’s wedding. It was an amazing day, and they put their heart and soul into organising the event. As is tradition, I had to write a speech. Going through the process reminded me how much I enjoyed writing. Finding solutons to awkwardly worded sentences, trying to convey an emotion in the right words – it is a complex riddle that I always enjoy engaging in. It convinced me that I should write again, so, today I wrote for an hour on my book, before deciding that I am going to come on here and throw as much negative bullshit at the wall as I can. I wanted my first post in a while to be positive and jovial, but then I wrote a few paragraphs for the book that I felt proud of, and decided to blow off some steam on the blog. I think it has helped.

On a more positive note, I am feeling physically much better than I was after the mop-up chemotherapy, other than the psedo-pain in my neck and armpits. My life is different and it is taking a lot of adjusting to. I’m eating better than I ever have, and I’m getting out walking a fair bit, which is nice. Despite the tone of this post, I am finding happiness here and there, but it is a battle to stay in those places. Perhaps that is just how it is post-cancer. I was so razor focused when I was actively fighting cancer, and the outcome felt so uncertain, that I found it sort of easy to be happy. I had the ultimate objective in front of me – do whatever I can, just stay alive. Once that is gone, I found myself questioning whether that is still the goal. No doctor will confidently tell me that I am definitely cancer free, and I am yet to find a medical professional who will reassure me that I am likely to survive in the long term, so I am well within my rights to feel a little nihilistic and defeatist. Just writing this post has made me feel quite a lot better, though. Now that the clocks have gone forward, at least the evenings are lighter and the temperature is getting warmer. My next scan at The Christie is next week, so I’ve got a healthy dose of scan-xiety coming up. Perhaps if the results of that are positive, I’ll spoil myself and write something nice on here. Fingers crossed.

Under Surveillance – The Final Cycle

8th January 202326th January 2023 godley93Anxiety, Anxious, Blog, Cancer, Chemotherapy, Christmas, Health, Pancreatic Cancer, Surgery6 Comments

The Chemotherapy Diaries

I draw a line in my life

Singing, “this is the new way I behave now”

One of my favourite writers is George Orwell. For years, I only really knew of his novel 1984 and the novella Animal Farm, and I wasn’t too fussed about either. It was only when I Googled for pieces of work similar to Bukowski’s book ‘Ham on Rye’ that I found out that Orwell also wrote a few non-fictional pieces. The best rated of these was ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’, a book written about Orwell’s time spent living in extreme poverty in Paris and London. He painted such a vivid picture of the exceptionally poor conditions these people lived in; his writing exuded empathy for their struggle, and you could always sense his appreciation for them in the way he wrote. The novel presents a cast of characters, very few of which have anything to be positive about in life. They are all living day to day, barely making enough money to put a roof over their heads, and frequently having to eat nothing at all, or settling for stale bread which they managed to negotiate the price of at the end of the selling day. I read the whole novel in a single day, and couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks. Despite this being a favourite book of mine, I never got around to reading another one of his non-fictional pieces titled ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, which has been on my radar for years.

A few days ago, as I sat absently watching TV, my phone vibrated in my pocket. I unlocked it to see that Audible had charged my account for a new token. If you aren’t aware of how Audible works, you essentially pay a monthly subscription fee which gives you a single token each month, which can be used to purchase any audiobook you like. If you wish to buy a book without a token, they are usually significantly more expensive. The scheme essentially encourages you to purchase a single item a month using your token, and then spend that month listening to it. These tokens build if you do not use them, and I had banked up a total of 6 during my time receiving treatment for cancer, as I had stopped using the service entirely. It would have actually been a great time for me to use it far more, but I used to listen to things primarily when walking around London, and I hadn’t been doing a lot of that over the past year, so the habit was broken, and it didn’t seem to be coming back. I’d subsequently decided to pause my account, so I wasn’t amassing enough tokens to purchase the entirety of Stephen King’s back catalogue.

Audible encouraged me to pause it for a set amount of time, though, as opposed to cancelling it, as that would lose me my tokens, and that set time had clearly come to an end. I decided it was time to start using some of those tokens, and I immediately purchased ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’. I may as well tick it off my incredibly dull bucket list… Some people want to skydive or visit one of the great wonders of the world, I want to sit in my bed and listen to someone reading back to me the depressing conditions that coal workers resided in during wartime Britain. Each to their own, I guess.

A few nights ago, I couldn’t sleep. It was about 3:30am; my abdomen was hurting, and I was concerned that something was going wrong with my cancer. At this point, I could stub my toe and 5 minutes later worry that my toe hurting may be linked to the cancer spreading. Can you get cancer in the toe? Probably not… If you can’t, I’ll likely be patient zero of the toe cancer world.

Laying in bed, I decided to cheer myself up by listening to ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’. The first few chapters are dominated by Orwell describing the brutal conditions of the coal mines. I sat with my headphones in, looking out of a small gap in the curtains. Through the break, I could directly see a streetlight on the road outside of my parent’s house. Rain was pouring down. I tried to follow single droplets as they made their way down the window pane, but they were quickly lost in the onslaught. Orwell was describing how coal workers have to walk anywhere from 1 to 5 miles underground to get to the coal face. The temperature in the shaft is unbearable, and the miners have to traverse a complex network, most of which they can barely even crouch in due to the size of the opening. That entire journey doesn’t even count towards their working hours for the day, and once they reach the coal face, they spend 7 hours on their knees, shovelling heavy coal onto a conveyer belt, before making their way back through the tight tunnel system, coal dust heavy in the air, before being pulled back up to the surface on the hoisted platform. I wondered if I had any right to complain about anything going on in my life compared to this world Orwell was painting. It may have given me some helpful perspective on my life, but it wasn’t helping me fall back to sleep. I turned it off and listened to some mindless podcast instead, which allowed me to fall back asleep in little time.

I’ve just started cycle 3, the final cycle, of the mop-up chemotherapy. Cycle 2 was a stagger – with 2 delays in treatment due to my liver functioning being too poor to proceed. The resolution to the issue seems to be the oncologists approving a new ‘permissible’ reading for the liver functioning tests, meaning that my liver can be slightly more fucked than it could before, without it triggering a delay in treatment. Although I am happy that delays are less likely to occur in cycle 3 due to this, I am sceptical.

Much of cycle 2 was spent with me feeling incredibly ill, spectacularly tired and constantly in fear of the next dose of chemotherapy tablets that I had to take that day. The dosage is 3 tablets, twice a day, and every time I have to take them, I throw them all back at once and quickly down some water to get rid of them. They almost make me choke every time; not because I struggle to physically get them down my throat, but because I can’t help but view them as evil little bastards that are going to make me feel more ill, more tired and more angry that this is really considered the best way to treat any illness in the modern world. The treatment might just save my life, though, and I do need to remind myself of that fact sometimes.

The final delay in cycle 2 meant that I would still be in the height of the chemotherapy treatment on Christmas day, whereas this was supposed to be during my week off between cycles. I was quite gutted about this, as Christmas is my favourite time of year. I wanted to feel my best around this period so I could see friends, eat too much and allow myself to decompress a little after a tough year. It wasn’t to be, though. I still managed to do most of those things, but there were a few dodgy periods.

A few days after Christmas, myself and 19 of my friends went to a local restaurant for a big meal. I’d really been looking forward to the event for weeks. We don’t all get together very often, so it felt novel and exciting. During the day, though, I’d felt very anxious and not myself. They are feelings that I am becoming better acquainted with these days, as I struggle to wrestle with the post-surgery world I inhabit. I’m constantly fighting with my volatile blood sugar levels due to having no pancreas, and the mop-up chemotherapy gives me more headaches in a single day than I have experienced in the rest of my life. They make it especially hard to get out of bed in the morning, and I frequently find myself unable to move for 2+ hours. Mornings used to be my favourite time of day; now they pass me by without barely acknowledging me.

For the first hour or so, I was quite enjoying the meal, but at some point, a trigger switched in my head without me realising. As I sat there, I looked around me at all the people I know and love, enjoying themselves, laughing, drinking and chatting away. I felt like a ghost; like there was a void around me separating me from them. I tried to shake it off and engage, but I couldn’t. All of a sudden, I felt like I was suffocating. I told the group that I wasn’t feeling too well, and that I needed to leave. After a few laboured goodbyes, I made my way out of the restaurant. The second the door closed behind me, I burst into tears. It surprised me as much as it surprised the man walking towards me on the street. He looked at me like I was crazy – he probably thought I was drunk.

I took a left turn to get off the main road and made my way back to my parent’s house via the quiet route, where people were less likely to see me and judge me. In the park next to their house, I sat on a wet bench and pushed my palms into my eyes, hoping to seal my tear ducts and stop whatever was going on. The episode seemed to be passing, so I made my way home. As soon as I walked into the front room with my parents, I tried to forget about what just happened, but couldn’t open my mouth without reverting straight back to that state. I burst out crying again, struggling to breathe; they asked me what was wrong, but I couldn’t muster an excuse. I still can’t. The whole thing was weird. “You’ve been through so much,” they both said to me in a comforting tone.

I tried to process what had brought it all on, but I couldn’t pinpoint anything. I just felt sad. More sad than I remembered feeling at any point during the whole 6 months of initial chemotherapy. The experience was annoying me – I felt angry at myself for not managing to be more positive under such good circumstances. My end-of-chemotherapy scan is at the end of January; if that comes back as clear, I will be classed as ‘cancer-free’ for the first time since my diagnosis. It should be so positive, but I now find myself looming over what that means. All of the statistics around pancreatic cancer are so depressing; you feel like the oncology staff are all treating you like a ticking timebomb who they expect will have a reoccurrence any day. It doesn’t feel like it is ‘if’, it feels like it is ‘when’. During a routine check-up call with one of my oncology team, I asked if I was technically in remission if that final scan shows no cancer.

“No, you’ll be classed as Under Surveillance,” she said. I was probably asking for the wrong reasons. I wanted to hear a medical professional tell me that I’d be getting that big green light. Perhaps they’d even ask if I want to ring a bell. Such celebrations don’t seem to be granted to those with pancreatic cancer. We’re put ‘Under Surveillance’; an Orwellian phrase with sinister undertones. Sometimes, you just want someone to buy into your bullshit. Is it so hard to grant me a single ounce of hope? I messaged Ali Stunt, the CEO of Pancreatic Cancer Action, explaining that I couldn’t find any definitions of ‘Under Surveillance’ on any cancer websites and that I just wanted to know if I could tell people that I was technically in remission if that scan is clear.

“You will be technically in remission, but they’ll be keeping a close eye on you,” she said. “They don’t like using the term ‘remission’.” She’s a wonderful person to be able to speak to about these things; she has been through it all. She understands how hard it can be.

Last Tuesday, I had my first infusion of cycle 3. As I waited in the chair for the chemotherapy nurse to come over and start my treatment, I had my head in my hands. The smell of the chemotherapy ward had made me gag as I walked in, not because it is bad per se, I just associate it with all of the sickness and hurt that I am feeling at the minute. Just being there makes my head spin.

The nurse came over and asked me if I was Ok. After I unloaded on her, she responded, “my sister died of pancreatic cancer about 10 years ago. They could barely treat it at all then.” She turned the iPad that she had in her hand around to show me the screen. At the top was my name and date of birth. Next to this was a section titled something like ‘Treatment Objective’, which was defined as ‘total eradictaion of the cancer.’

“They still see the objective of your treatment as killing all of the cancer, and giving you a normal life again,” she said as she pointed to the screen. It was quite awe inspiring; I wondered if it was a tactic she had adopted before. It’s a really powerful one. That did make me feel better, and I’ve reminded myself of the moment a few times since it happened.

I’m back in treatment on Tuesday for session 2, assuming my liver functioning doesn’t disrupt the schedule, like it did during sessions 2 and 3 of the last cycle. My challenge to myself is to try and get some of that positivity back that I used to have during my first bout of chemotherapy, and stop focusing on the negative. I’m not working down a dusty mine shaft, and my treatment objective is still to eradicate the cancer. There is plenty to be grateful for.

I hope that everyone reading this had a lovely Christmas and New Year, and that you are dealing with the January blues as best you can. It will hopefully be the month that I am told that I have no signs of cancer. What a way to welcome 2023 that would be!

Chemotherapy Returns: A Tale of Tiredness & Ulcers

30th October 2022 godley93Blog, Cancer, Chemotherapy, Health, Lifestyle, Pancreatic Cancer, Recovery, Surgery, Treatment, Ulcers6 Comments

The Chemotherapy Diaries

Back in the chemotherapy fog…

As I lay on the sofa a few nights ago, the TV show I was watching ended. After a few minutes of adverts, a sound I dreaded came on… The news was beginning. I couldn’t see the remote around me, and I was feeling worn out from the chemotherapy. It’s becoming more regular for me to fall asleep on the sofa involuntarily, my personal signature of chemotherapy. I’d been in and out of sleep on the sofa for a few hours at this point. The sound of the news starting, with the summary of all the goings-on in the world and the familiar music, struck me awake, but not quite awake enough to get up and find the remote. I lay there for ten minutes or so listening to the headlines, feeling any enthusiasm and positivity I had for the world drain from my being.

I salute anyone who frequently and voluntarily watches the news. Although I think it is good to be aware of what is going on in the world, it really can bring you down. The list of awful events just reinforces this cynical idea I have in my head that there is a lack of cohesion between almost every force in the world. It leaves you feeling certain that we’re all doomed, and rightfully so. It is a feeling that I just can’t face when I’m already wrestling with the negative effects of chemotherapy. After those ten minutes, I mustered up the energy to push my body off the sofa and looked around the room to find the remote. I saw it on the other sofa. As I pressed the off button on the remote and deadened the life from the TV, I breathed a sigh of relief. Not today, I thought to myself. I’ve got my own battle to focus on. My battle against sleeping every second of every day. I’d been losing it that day.

It made me wonder whether news readers have to compartmentalize themselves from the things that they are reading every day. When it is your job to read that these 50 people died here and that this war rages on there and that there is a potential famine on the horizon in this country, do you just read the words and not process their meaning? Perhaps they are too focused on getting through the thirty minutes that they are on air to really consider the meaning of what they are saying. Maybe they attend parties and roll their eyes as everyone expects them to reel off line after line about how terrible that flood was last week, and how the death toll rises with every day that passes. The whole world becomes work to them, as everyone assumes that their favourite pastime is to discuss the headlines they report every day. A little like expecting an accountant to want to do your year-end accounts at a party because they must have gotten into accountancy as it was their passion – right?

Like the imaginary news reporter I have created here, I find myself struggling to consider the going-ons with chemotherapy this time around. During the first week, it was because nothing was really happening. I had my 30-minute infusion at the hospital and was surprised to learn that it really is just that – 30 minutes of infusion, then home. It sounded too good to be true, so I couldn’t believe it before I saw it with my own eyes. During Folfirinox, the chemotherapy I was on before my surgery, I would spend a good 5 hours at the hospital undergoing the infusion of various bags of chemotherapy drugs. This time, upon learning that I would only be required to do a single 30-minute infusion, and then take tablets every day, I couldn’t believe my luck. Week 1 reinforced this feeling that luck was finally on my side – it seemed that I’d sail through this treatment schedule and be clear of all of this cancer stuff. That is great for me, but it left me feeling dry in terms of content for the blog. There wasn’t much to report, and I don’t want to just continue blasting every nurse who takes blood from me every week; although, the nurse who did my blood test before my first treatment week did make my arm hurt for 3 days… These blood-suckers just can’t resist roughing you up sometimes.

The tablets that I have to take every day aren’t pleasant, but they felt much more manageable than an extended infusion at the hospital. I have to take 3 tablets, twice a day. I was getting into a routine of having the first 3 after my breakfast in the morning, then taking the second load after my evening meal. Because I had extremely bad mouth ulcers during my first phase of chemotherapy treatment, I’ve been conscious of not leaving the tablets in my mouth too long before washing them down with water. I’m sure that has no weighing on whether you get mouth ulcers from them or not, but I’ve convinced myself that it does, so the most stressful part of taking the tablets in that first week was getting the tablets down fast enough without nearly choking on the water. Other than that, it felt pretty simple. Onto week 2.

Week 2 is where the more ugly side effects started to reveal themselves. The infusion was all good again. “I feel like I’m being let out of school early because it’s been snowed off,” I quipped to the others sitting in the chairs around me in the hospital, as I picked up my stuff and left after another seamless 30-minute infusion. It genuinely felt like that; before I’d settled into reading a book or listening to an audiobook, the pump would be making its familiar alarm noise signifying that the cycle was complete. It catches me off guard every time – I just can’t believe it has really finished that quickly. Wonderful.

I was starting to notice that I felt a lot more tired in week 2. The chemotherapy tablets were starting to really mess with my stomach when I took them too, so I was starting to resent having to take them. I’d be eating my evening meal and trying to enjoy it, but every other bite came with another warning thought – “when this is over, you’re going to have to take those tablets again,” I’d say to myself. It puts me off my food as if it is the food’s fault. I know it isn’t, but it is nice to blame something. A few times, I’d totally forget that I needed to take them after eating, only remembering as I climbed into bed. That meant taking them on an empty stomach, which only seemed to make the symptoms worse. I’d swallow them and sit in anticipation as I wait for the sick feeling to come, the pains in the abdomen, the need to run to the toilet; it just wears you down.

The tiredness was getting worse too. I was starting to need twice as much sleep to be able to focus on anything. I’m working full-time now, whereas I didn’t work at all during the last 7 months of chemotherapy treatment. This cycle is definitely more manageable, so I don’t think that it is necessary to go off for the entire time again, but trying to do full days whilst on chemotherapy is hard in my experience so far. Your brain power is just shot – trying to focus on something for a long time is hard, and I get a lot of headaches on this new chemotherapy regime. When you have a banging headache, the last thing you want to do is sit staring at a screen. I’ve started having to take more regular breaks instead, and I’ve been starting a little later in the morning, but it all brings this feeling that you aren’t doing enough and that you should be forcing yourself through those tough patches. That brings a whole new world of anxiety to deal with alongside the already tough symptoms. It was about to get worse, though…

Towards the end of week 2, I started feeling something that I had been dreading. Mouth ulcers. My god if there is one thing I have learnt from going through all of this chemotherapy, it is that I absolutely hate mouth ulcers more than anything on this planet. Why oh why is my body’s default reaction to these toxins in my body to start punishing me even more in the most sinister and annoying way possible. I’d really love someone to explain to me why mouth ulcers are a thing, so I could simply shout “fuck you,” at that individual before throwing the glass bottle of Diflam mouthwash, issued by the hospital to help tackle said mouth ulcers, directly at the nearest wall, followed by a public protest of me licking up all of the green residue until none remained. The mouthwash doesn’t seem to do anything to actually tackle the ulcers themselves, it just numbs your mouth enough that you can’t feel how painful and annoying the ulcers are temporary. Although that relieves some of the symptoms, it does little to actually tackle the problem. I’ve lost faith in those little glass bottles issued by the hospital and engage in them with the same enthusiasm as a gazelle does a lion, as they catch eyes across the watering hole.

On Thursday, I went to Manchester to do some recording for the wonderful charity Pancreatic Cancer Action. They asked if I wanted to be featured in a video they are creating, to be released during Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month – November, the same month I was diagnosed; another dark nod from the universe, grinning its ugly teeth at me. “Oh, Dan’s aware of pancreatic cancer,” I imagine the universe saying last November as it sat awaiting my diagnosis. Some people only think the universe is against them… I have proof that it is. Anyway, my wife Anna came along with me. Before our recording time, we grabbed some brunch together in a cafe, and I took my chemotherapy tablets. All was well, and the lunch was lovely. As we arrived at the filming location, I started feeling a bit worse for wear, and I was getting some cold sweats, and a sickness was building in my stomach. I was starting to feel bad. I kept my composure and made it through the recording. After that, my plan was to go to Huddersfield to see my best friend Luke. Anna had a work meeting, so she set up camp in the building where we had been recording. I grabbed the keys from her and made my way back to the car to grab my bag. By the time I got to the car, I was overwhelmed with the sickness. My head was spinning, and I was having to wipe sweat from my forehead with my sleeve. I meekly climbed into the back seat of the car, fashioned a coat into a pillow, and lay there with the car door slightly ajar in case I needed to throw up. I fell asleep like this, only to be woken up by Anna returning to the car about an hour later. It was official – I was back in the swing of chemotherapy. It was exactly how I remembered it.

So, as I started week 3 on Friday with the starting gun 30-minute infusion, which marks the start of a fresh week in the chemotherapy cycle, I was not feeling too enthusiastic. My family have been unlucky enough to bear the brunt of my negativity so far, as they are the main ones who are in earshot of my tired complaining, so I decided it was finally time to spread the weight of my complaints across a wider network. That network started with the nurses at The Christie, who I finally informed at length of the sickness I was getting when taking the tablets, and the constant tiredness I was experiencing. The tiredness seems like a pretty standard-issue symptom, and their remedy for that was more sleep… Reasonable, but my unreasonable brain wasn’t happy with it as a solution. I hoped they’d start dishing out speed tablets or give me an NHS-funded Costa card to start drinking coffee by the pint load – hospital orders, paid for by the taxpayer. For the sickness, though, they advised me to start taking anti-sickness tablets an hour before eating, and then see if that stops the sickness from arising when I take the tablets. They advised me that if this doesn’t work, they can issue stronger anti-sickness medication, as the one I am currently being issued is quite low-duty. I don’t like learning that I’m getting the low-duty stuff. Give me the good stuff; I’m not here to play games.

That was on Friday. Today is Sunday, and I find myself writing this after falling asleep on my bed for 3 hours in the early hours of the afternoon, after eating lunch and immediately feeling sick to my stomach for doing so. I think I’m going to need to make that call and get those higher-strength anti-sickness tablets. I’m still not sure what I’ll do about the tiredness, but starting Friday next week is my first rest week, so it should get better from there. All I need to do is repeat this 4-week cycle another 2 times, and then I’m free. 3 weeks of a single weekly 30-minute infusion, followed by tablets twice a day for 21 days, then a week off. It can’t be that hard right? I did double this length of time last time, on much more toxic chemotherapy. The mouth ulcers are still far better than they were at their worst last time, but they started mild then too… Time will tell, I guess.

Like my imaginary news reader, I find myself back at the mercy of my trade – regurgitating events on a page, and struggling to comprehend their meaning. Every second you experience a negative symptom, you struggle, but you understand that this is all part of the game, and there is little time to do much more than grit your teeth and push through to the next milestone, whether that be the next meal, infusion, or rest week. The words do little to alleviate the struggles because you’ve already wrestled your way through them. This is me living to tell the tale, and I’m still grateful for that, even if I do find myself co-existing with a legion of mouth ulcers. They did not have my permission to exist, and we shall never live harmoniously. I’ll continue drinking the Diflam mouthwash by the bucketload and, most likely, continue to be disappointed by the results.

Anyway, I’m going back to sleep. I’ve been awake far too long writing this.

Marathoner

6th October 2022 godley93Blog, Cancer, Charity, Fundraising, Health, Iron Man, Lifestyle, Marathon, Pancreatic Cancer, Positivity, Recovery, Surgery, TreatmentLeave a comment

Greg at the Iron Man World Championships

My slight insomnia seems more determined than ever right now, so I find myself starting writing this post at 00:30 on Monday morning. I spent Sunday attempting to support my eldest sister Becky as she ran the London marathon. My ‘attempt’ to support her wasn’t because I was not indeed supporting her through my thoughts and words, but because my physical attendance on the day was cut short due to some fairly routine stomach problems. It’s a shame as I came down to London this weekend specifically to support her on her big day, but after only managing to see her once at around the 13 mile mark, my stomach problems kicked in. I tried to persevere, but sometimes these issues aren’t down to perseverance, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself in central London, in front of my family and my new wife. That really would have been a test of our vows. ‘Bowels testing the vows’. What a horrible yet intriguing sentence. Perhaps it’d make a good play. Someone should write it.

Becky hasn’t run a marathon before and judging by her first message after finishing, I’m not sure she’ll be rushing to do another one. “Fuck am I ever doing that again,” read her first message in our family WhatsApp group. My dad isn’t a fan of swearing, so she must have really meant it. As we’ve gotten older, we’ve gotten lax with our swearing around our dad, but you could tell she really meant those words; it wasn’t just inflammatory for the sake of winding up my now retired dad (he’s finally officially a pensioner as of the close of business last Friday, despite actually taking his pension a few years ago).

Whether she does one again or not, it’s a huge achievement. I know people think every Godley has some natural trait which makes them able to do marathons at the drop of a hat, but it really isn’t true. Some of us go to pretty extreme lengths with our love of exercise – my brother, Greg, goes to extremely extreme extremes, but we’ll come back to that later. Becky isn’t typically one of them, though. She enjoys running to keep fit, but also enjoys actually having free time where she isn’t training. She also probably enjoys occasionally dressing up, having a few too many drinks and getting blisters from her nicer looking shoes, as opposed to already having them from running too many miles, too many times and over too many weekends. I hope she will get to indulge in a few of these now that the marathon is out of the way. She has earned it.

In all seriousness, she really isn’t one of the Godley’s who loves the punishment that comes with these more extreme events. Or she isn’t historically, anyway. Who knows where this will take her now… I know that people will think I’m being modest here, as I have completed quite a few marathons and even more ultramarathons, but I really do put myself in the same category as her in terms of natural ability. I don’t have a lot of natural ability with running, and I think she feels the same way. Any skill I had with running came from sheer determination. I just kept doing it and doing it and doing it, never getting loads faster, but managing to go a lot further. Each time I entered a new marathon, I told myself that this would be the one where I would do an impressive time, but it never really happened. At my first ever marathon, I finished with a time of 3hr 47, and I felt relatively happy, but I thought I could do better. The only other road marathon I completed was the Brighton marathon, and a combination of hot weather and having pancreatic cancer, but not knowing that I had pancreatic cancer, meant I finished with a less-than-impressive 4hr 3. The only thing that I consider quite impressive in my speed repertoire is my half marathon PB of 1hr 38, but this is still pretty slow for someone who trained as hard as I did. Ultramarathons were always more my thing – I could dig deep over distance, and that seemed to give me an edge. But anyway, this isn’t meant to be about me…

Becky may not love the punishment of a tough training schedule, and she may not have the natural speed and agility that my dad had, but she’s ran a marathon. In many ways, it is more impressive to see someone finish a marathon who is not a seasoned marathoner, than it is to watch someone complete their 40th marathon that year. The grit and determination that she showed to get over that finish line is admirable and inspiring. The fact that she also did the marathon in aid of The Christie, the cancer-specialist hospital that provide my oncology care and who have almost definitely extended my life considerably, if not actually saved it from the hands of pancreatic cancer, makes it even more special.

My surgeon told me that most oncology teams in the country, if not the world, would have told me that nothing further could be done based on my diagnosis (stage 3 pancreatic cancer, with an artery fully enclosed by the tumour) and the images produced by the CT scan post-chemotherapy. My specialist at The Christie recognises the limitations of these scans, however, and is an incredibly forward-thinking individual when it comes to the treatment of pancreatic cancer. He is an example of the excellence that The Christie has become associated with. That excellence attracts excellence, and that is how he became associated with my surgeon, Mr Nicola de´ Liguori. Together, their pioneering approach to treating pancreatic cancer, led to the full removal of the tumour, against all of the odds.

Where others would have accepted defeat, they pioneered an approach of calculated risk – daring to hope that by taking on that risk in major surgery, they might be able to generate a better result for me. They did, and I can’t thank them enough for it. Mr de´ Liguori specifically requested that I name him in my blog posts, as he wants to encourage this type of approach more often when treating pancreatic cancer. I’m unsure about my oncologist, and whether he would want me to speak about him by name, so I won’t name him specifically. Mr de´ Liguori has seen more people approaching him for a second opinion on scan results, and he wants this to continue. Many people don’t even realise that one can survive without a pancreas. My brother Freddie is the most recent person to experience this, as he told a friend in the pub that his brother had recently had his entire pancreas removed. “You must be wrong, Freddie. You can’t live without a pancreas,” his friend responded. Freddie then wondered whether he had got it wrong, or if I had even gotten it wrong and had misunderstood what had occurred in the surgery. Neither of us were wrong, though. It just isn’t common.

There are probably a lot of reasons that a total pancreatectomy is uncommon – sometimes the tumour is too established, and it wouldn’t save the patient’s life. Sometimes the cancer has already spread. I’ve seen it sighted online that it is the huge lifestyle changes post-surgery, with the patient being diabetic and needing enzyme replacement for life, that makes a total pancreatectomy an unattractive option. This last one intimidated me for weeks after the surgery, but I feel very differently about it now. The lifestyle changes are immaterial if it saves your life – I am proof of that; you can adapt very quickly, and all of the lifestyle changes just become normal. Far better than just dying. There are almost undoubtedly many cases where such an approach could save a patient’s life, or give them more valuable years. I’m lucky enough to have received treatment at two world-class hospitals, The Christie and Manchester Royal Infirmary. I’m about to start chemotherapy back at The Christie in a few weeks, and I’m extremely glad to be back under their care for what will hopefully be the last phase of my treatment for cancer.

Becky is just under £30 away from hitting her fundraising target, and it would mean the world to her if you could help push her over that goal. You can donate here if you are willing and able.

Becky Seeming a Little Delirious

My brother Greg seems to have far more natural ability in terms of speed and stamina than Becky and me. He gets that from my dad. I put myself far more in my mother’s camp – a person who has run a marathon in her day, and even did a few trail ultra marathons, but who did not indulge in a running schedule totalling an average of over 100 miles a week, acting like it was totally normal like my dad did when he was in his 20’s. Greg is definitely following in my dad’s footsteps. He may have even created his own footsteps on the path to self-damnation with his latest series of events, though.

In the past few weeks, Greg has challenged himself to 3 separate events. He has cycled from Inverness to Preston, done a double Iron Man (where you do twice the distance of the swim, bike and run) and he is currently in Hawaii to compete in the Iron Man world championship, after qualifying for his age category. I don’t really need to speak too much more about it all – the level of exercise that Greg is now engaged in is utterly ridiculous. There is a bittersweet element to watching him challenge himself in this way for me – I never really got into the Iron Man stuff, but we used to do a lot of ultra marathons together. I hope to get back to a place where we can do this together again, but I fear that I will forever be slowing him down now. Perhaps he needs slowing down a little bit, though.

Greg is raising money for Pancreatic Cancer Action, a charity who have helped me out a lot since being diagnosed. Their founder, Ali Stunt, is a 15+ year survivor of pancreatic cancer; that is not something you see very often. It would be easy to chalk this down to ‘luck’, but you start learning that there is more to these things than simple luck. Her determination to help others resulted in her setting up her charity and the work they do is so incredibly important to people like me. She has helped me out immensely throughout my treatment and continues to help me out now. I’m so grateful to her and her team for everything the have done for me, and am so happy that Greg has chosen to raise money for them.

Greg is a couple of hundred away from reaching his target – you can donate here if you would like to. The world championships are happening on Thursday in Hawaii, so be sure to check out the Just Giving page to find out how Greg does in the event.

Sonder

29th September 2022 godley93Blog, Cancer, Chemotherapy, Diabetes, Health, Hope, Hospital, Lifestyle, Pancreatic Cancer, Recovery, Scan, Scanxiety, Surgery9 Comments

‘The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own, which they are constantly living despite one’s personal lack of awareness of it.’
Wikipedia, Definition of ‘Sonder’

I’m sure the title of this blog post will be met with glee by some of my closest friends, so I may as well get the story out of the way. When I was 18, I learnt the word ‘Sonder’ for the first time. I can’t remember where I heard the term; I have a suspicion that a band I liked put out a song with that title, but I’m not sure what band and I don’t have any recollection of the song itself. I quickly looked up what the word meant, and its definition immediately struck a chord with me, as it perfectly framed something that I had thought about many times but had never managed to properly define. It is such an interesting concept and one that still occurs to me frequently.

The most recent time it occurred to me was when I was sitting in a traffic jam earlier in the week. There were roadworks on, and some temporary traffic lights were in place to control the three-directional traffic. In a classic case of ‘The World vs Me’, I watched as the lights seemed to let every car come through from the other directions, then only allow about 5 cars through from my direction before turning red again. I was getting wound up despite having nowhere to be, and it all was pretty inconsequential whether it took an extra 5 minutes for me to get through these lights and get home. At some point, I became cognisant that I was being stupid, and I started telling myself that it did not matter and that I was one of many people who were experiencing the exact same thing at that moment. Then I started to think about the fact that someone else might actually be late for something in that queue – a spouse’s birthday party, picking their child up from school etc. Maybe someone was sitting in that queue after having a horrible day at work and knew they were returning home to an empty house, after recently getting divorced, or some other miserable scenario. I started romanticising the idea that my life wasn’t so bad, and that someone else in this queue was probably dealing with something far worse than me, and that I should use this time to just relax for a few minutes. It helped me gain some perspective, even if the scenarios were completely imaginary. I actually managed to forget that I have cancer for a few minutes, and was even claiming to have an enviable life because I didn’t have anything to get annoyed at these temporary lights for, other than the mild inconvenience. If only that was the measure of success in the world… I’d be a bona field Buddha by the now if it was.

Anyway, back to the story. Young, 18-year-old Dan, was totally in awe of this new construct that he had discovered. So what did he do? He got it tattooed across the right side of his chest… because why wouldn’t you do that? The word ‘Sonder’ awkwardly lay across my chest in a curly font for no real reason other than “I liked the definition.” It was my first tattoo, so part of me wanted to see what it felt like getting one too, and perhaps that made me more willing to randomly get a word tattooed on my chest. I was yearning for any excuse to get a tattoo now that I could legally do it.

I’ve since had it covered up. Not because I was ashamed of it, it just looked quite lost having a single word on my chest, and it was difficult to get things done around it without it looking strange. So, it is no longer there. I haven’t lived it down with my friends, though, and one of the common jokes was that it actually read ‘Sandra’ instead of ‘Sonder’. Despite never having dated anyone called Sandra, the joke was that I got an ex’s name tattooed on my chest before we broke up. I did play my own part in perpetuating this joke as I did find it very funny, and would regularly tell people that I had an ex-girlfriend’s name tattooed across my chest. Sometimes it is better to just indulge in the joke as opposed to becoming a victim of it. I also found the joke pretty funny, so that helps.

The ‘Sonder’ Tattoo – During Masters Year, 2015

I’m not sure why I thought the best course of action after discovering a new word I liked was to immediately get it tattooed on my chest. Whether I thought it made me more interesting, or whether I liked the way that this obscure word might help explain something about me as a person, I’m not really sure. I can’t remember how I thought then, and I struggle to relate to a lot of my actions throughout this period of my life now. After all, I was a very different person then, one who drank to extremes and actively ignored many uncomfortable truths about myself. I probably still ignore some uncomfortable truths about myself, but some, like the fact that I have cancer and am statistically very likely to die in the next 5 years, I feel like I’m pretty good at facing… maybe I’m even too good at facing those uncomfortable truths now, and the more pertinent challenge is learning to ignore them and just enjoy myself.

The thing is, I have a lot of tattoos now, and I don’t really understand why I got many of them, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like them. They capture something about myself, from a certain point in my life. I try not to regret any of them, even the one that I got covered up… Poor Sandra; the ex that never existed. As a concept, though, the term ‘sonder’ does still mean a lot to me, both because I decided to get it tattooed on me at some point, and because it did have such an impact on me upon finding out its definition.

The motivation for writing this post came at 4am yesterday morning, as I lay in bed struggling to sleep. For some reason, I decided to start making my way through some of the comments that have accumulated on the blog. I’ve had a backlog of comments which have built up over the past 2 months since I had the surgery. At first, they built up because I didn’t have the energy to respond to them. Then they continued to build up, and I continued to not answer them as it felt disrespectful to the older comments if I only answered the newer ones. Then, I had so many to respond to that I just shied away from the task. I haven’t been posting too often anyway, so I assumed that my readers weren’t taking my absence to heart. It must have been obvious that I was struggling, I thought, and that made me feel better that I had not been responding. I was struggling, so it was hardly a lie. I still am, but it’s getting easier.

Well, as I lay there unable to sleep, I decided that the time had come to start responding. I’m so glad I did. Although I had read all of the comments before, most of them whilst I was still in hospital, or only recently after I had got out, I’m not sure I had properly considered what many of them were saying. People can be so incredibly supportive – I felt really touched as I made my way through them and started responding. It got me thinking back on the concept of sonder and how profound it is.

We get so caught up in what is going on in our own lives that we can easily fall into the trap of thinking that we are truly alone in whatever struggle we are engaged in. That feeling of solitude can be detrimental to our well-being; sometimes more so than the struggle itself. I’m lucky that I have the blog, and this stops me from falling into such a trap so easily, as I have a small network of people who frequently reach out to me, with very similar experiences to the ones I talk about. It still surprises me just how similar some of the experiences that I read about are to mine, though. One person had recently commented on the blog stating that they had a total pancreatectomy (a full removal of the pancreas) only 8 weeks ago. I had the same procedure only 10 weeks ago. In the hospital (where I did suffer from feeling truly isolated and had nothing but time to dwell on my circumstances), I fell deeply into the feeling that I was alone – that what was happening to me was not being experienced by anyone else in the world. That feeling is crippling. It dragged me to the deepest pits of the human experience, resulting in an episode of delirium and some of the darkest thoughts I’ve ever had.

As I read that someone else had experienced the same surgery as me only 8 weeks ago, only a few weeks after my surgery date, I almost felt giddy. It feels sort of sadistic to admit that I was happy to read someone is going through what I am, especially knowing how difficult it has been. That shared experience goes a long way in normalising what is happening to me, though. Not ‘normalising’ in a negative way – not that you ever want to ‘normalise’ suffering from cancer, despite it feeling very normal when you see how busy the oncology wards are at hospitals – but normalising it in a way that makes it feel just that… Normal. At times, the most difficult part of going through everything that I have with pancreatic cancer is the feeling that I’m the only one going through it, due to the constant reminders from health professionals that “not many people your age get pancreatic cancer,” and the fact that “it is very rare for someone to successfully have a surgery like yours.” Even the latter, which is meant to be something positive, doesn’t feel positive when you’re still reeling from the surgery months later, struggling to manage the aggressive form of diabetes now bestowed upon you and still having to visit the wound clinic every day to change the dressings on your abdomen, because the wound still insists on bleeding to this day. Thinking that someone else is probably experiencing these same frustrations right now just makes me feel less abnormal. It is strangely comforting.

The problem with seeking out these types of shared experiences is that sometimes you find something which has the opposite effect. After spending about an hour responding to comments, I decided to look on Twitter, a platform I have been mostly ignoring since the operation. Due to me following a lot of cancer-centric pages and people on there, the algorithm has pinned me down as a real cancer-loving fellow. It is essentially all I see in my feed now. It brings a mix of personalities – the positive ones, the grieving ones, the defeatist ones, and a whole spectrum in between. Unfortunately, I stumbled across the below post at about 5am.

I cringe internally whenever I read that after (insert treatment or surgery) someone feels they'll be cancer free. I honestly hope that person will be free of this crap, but how many do we know that find out a short time later that the cancer is still there or has metastasized?
— Mindy (@MinThomp) September 25, 2022

Considering I have scan results later today on Thursday, around 10 weeks after my surgery, this isn’t exactly what I wanted to read today, especially at 5am when I am feeling frustrated and tired. I’ve been comforting myself by saying that the scan can’t possibly pick anything up this quickly, and must just be a process thing to allow me to start chemotherapy, but this post made me think otherwise. I get that it is probably based on real experience, and I know that in most cases my cancer does come back in the form of metastasis to another part of the body, but what a bleak way of looking at things. Hoping to be cancer free should not be something worth criticising, I would hope. Let someone dream – hope isn’t always equivalent to denial. You can both hope to be cancer free and remain that way, yet know that it is unlikely to be the case. This is the world I find myself in – hoping I’ll stay cancer free, yet knowing it may, and probably will be, futile. Perhaps I’m just feeling a little defensive after an unwelcome dose of reality.

Still, the concept of sonder, where everyone has their own view of the world, and where everyone is at the centre of their own universe, can be incredibly comforting when you are going through hardship. No matter how bad things feel for you at any given moment, there is always someone going through something similar. Whether you seek those people out and communicate directly with them, through the internet or some kind of support group, or just allow the thought that they exist to comfort you, I hope it does comfort you when you are feeling low. If it doesn’t, I hope you have at least enjoyed reading about the concept of sonder, and next time you’re sitting in a traffic jam, it encourages you to think about all of those other cars and their occupants, and how they’re probably just as angry as you are about having to wait. I might even be in the car behind you…

The concept of sonder reminds me that these things that are bothering me are not unique to me. There is a whole network of others currently lying in bed, considering the fact that they have scan results for their own cancer later today. Some of them may have more on the line than me. I don’t really know what bad results would mean for me… another tumour? What would that actually mean? Different chemotherapy? No chemotherapy at all? Who knows. Someone is probably just being diagnosed for the first time this second, and I don’t envy them at all. That first diagnosis is soul-crushing. The words which trigger a plethora of existentialism, and start a new chapter in life; one of hospitals, sympathetic looks and a whole load of “I’m glad that isn’t happening to me”’s, even if most of them are probably only said in other people’s minds… Because if it isn’t happening to you, then you should be happy that it isn’t. Why wouldn’t you be? You should be glad it isn’t happening to you… I wish it wasn’t happening to me.

But I’m equally glad that it is happening to me and not to either of my parents, my siblings, my wife or any of my friends. Anyway, it is happening to them in a different way, and even that is hard for me to process. Let’s just hope that the scan is clear, so I can get on to the mop-up chemotherapy, and then push through to being ‘cancer free’, for a while, at least.

Wedding Day

25th September 2022 godley93Blog, Cancer, Chemotherapy, Diabetes, Health, Lifestyle, Marriage, Pancreatic Cancer, Positivity, Surgery, Wedding6 Comments

It feels a little weird to sit down and write a blog centred around a wedding. Usually, I feel like I understand my role in writing the blog – I describe gritty scenes of hospitals and feeling unwell, demanding the reader’s sympathy, all to make myself feel better about the predicament I find myself in. So where does a wedding fit into a cancer blog? Well, it was my wedding, and I have cancer… or I had cancer. I’m not sure what is technically correct right now. Until I’ve finished the mop-up chemotherapy, I don’t feel like I can say I’m cancer free, but the sugeron did tell me that I was technically ‘cancer free’ before I was discharged from his care. Considering I have just had another scan on Friday, I’m not going to curse it and start ringing the bell of success just yet. That would be tempting fate. Let’s say I do still have cancer, for now.

The wedding date was Friday, September 16th. Despite there being a few days of rain prior to the day itself, the sun showed up for the event. We did personally invite it, so it would have been rude if it had shunned us. Another issue had been looming over the event, though. Rail strikes were planned across England and were majorly impacting the train services which many of our guests would be using to get to the venue. In the weeks leading up to the wedding day, I was receiving more and more messages from friends stating that their trains had been cancelled. One friend who was travelling from France had messaged me to tell me that the Eurostar train service from France to England had even been cancelled, and she was having to seek an alternative route to the wedding. Everything was going wrong. Then, Queen Elizabeth sadly died the week before the wedding, and all train strikes were called off. The circumstances were unfortunate, but they did benefit us. Perhaps the omens surrounding the wedding weren’t so bad after all.

I started the day in my own bed, alone. Anna had stayed with her family in their Airbnb. A sudden panic had come over me as I had no idea where Anna’s wedding ring was, and whether I was supposed to have it. She didn’t inform me that she was going to ignore me all morning, but I got an inkling that this was occurring when she ignored my 3 calls to her that morning. Her mum rang me back a few minutes later, fulfilling her apparent role as ‘messenger’. Luckily, Anna and her mum had the ring. It then occurred to me, however, that I didn’t know who was supposed to have the rings for the ceremony. I understood it was the ringbearer, but who was the ringbearer? It should have been our dog Lucy, but we doubted the venue would allow it. Anna’s mum, Kathy, also would not have allowed the wedding to go ahead if we had actually given Lucy the rings, so the dream was already dead.

I took an executive decision and gave my wedding ring to Keiran, my brother-in-law, and our new ringbearer. The decision was very thought out. “You can be the ringbearer,” I retorted to his complaints that he didn’t have a role at the wedding. Keiran’s thirst for attention needed to be sated somehow, so it seemed an easy fix to both problems. When it came to presenting the rings during the ceremony, he made a huge song and dance out of the whole affair, ensuring he was stood at the front for as long as possible. ‘Forgetting’ which pocket which ring was in, and taking as long as possible to dig them out and pass them over, Keiran made the most of his 5 minutes of fame. “Keiran nearly did a good job,” the registrar said at the end of the ceremony. Even she was sick of his antics; I’ve been putting up with them for 7 years now.

The day went very quickly, as everyone always tells you it does. I could barely breathe between conversations and was constantly getting dragged in twenty directions. All the nerves I felt came at the start of the day, when people started to arrive outside of the venue. Once the ceremony started, they mostly dissipated, only coming back again as the speeches began. My speech was third out of the four, and I sat trying to focus on what was being said in the speeches that came before me, but with one half of my brain focused on the impending speech that I’d have to deliver. Things went very similarly to my nerves at the start of the day, I felt incredibly nervous at first, but after a few of the routine jokes went down well and I really started to believe that I had the room on my side, it got easier. I then got to enjoy my best man’s speech with impunity. All of the speeches were great, and it was interesting to see all of the different approaches taken during them.

By the evening part of the wedding, I was starting to feel tired out. I lasted until about 23:00, though, which is much better than I thought I’d manage at the start of the day. Aside from the guilt of not speaking to anyone enough, the day went as well as we could have hoped it would. I thought that I’d suffer from a huge lull once it was all over. It has been a beacon of light ever since we set the date around 7 months ago; a safety net that was there to support is no matter how bad things were getting in the present. Strangely, I’ve felt quite the opposite. It has felt easy to appreciate that it was an amazing day, but that it is over now.

There is a comfort knowing that it all went so well, and that I am now happily married. I think it is a lesson that I have been learning over the past 12 months. As you adjust to a new standard of life, and a new reality that you exist in, one which requires you to be ever more conscientious of the fragility of it all, you learn to really enjoy something for what it is. We cannot go back and relive special days like our wedding day, we can only breathe life into those memories by chatting with friends and family about them, looking at the pictures and re-experiencing the key components – things like the first dance song or the main course that you chose. That has to be enough once the day is over. If it is not, you will mourn the fact that you can’t do it all again, and it will tarnish how you special it all was. Anna and I have been listening to our first dance song a lot in the past week. It’s been lovely.

The First Dance Song

After the wedding, we spent a night away at a very nice hotel called The Tawny in Stafforshire. We could only get one night at such short notice, which was unfortunate. It has lovely grounds around it, and we spent a few hours walking around and discovering some of the hidden treasures. We randomly found a tennis table as we walked along a path, and Anna proved just how terrible her hand-eye coordination is. It was good fun. I couldn’t take advantage of the hot tob like she could, as the wound on my abdomen is still open and at risk of getting infected. I sat next to the hot tub reading whilst she enjoyed the bubbles. It was a nice way to spend the evening and definitely made it feel special, as we would not usually do something like that so off the cuff. Perhaps we should start being more impulsive like this, but I have 3 more months of chemotherapy to get through first, which is why we hadn’t booked a proper honeymoon yet.

Exploring the Grounds

This week it has been back to the hospital appointments. On Thursday I had a meeting with a diabetes specialist nurse at Manchester Royal Infirmary. The nurse told me that she only did two days a week as a diabetes nurse at the hospital, and spent the others as a sports nutritionist for a university. As a result, we ended up speaking a lot about running and its impact on your body. I told her that I was starting to consider running again, and that I had been running throughout my first bout of chemotherapy. She wasn’t impressed. I didn’t know this, but she told me that your lungs and respiratory system are very vulnerable during and after running. With my body going through so much, with the chemotherapy, surgery, and with the upcoming chemotherapy, she told me that I should be careful. I asked her how long she would suggest waiting before starting again, and she responded that she would wait until at least 6 months after finishing chemotherapy. I was quite shocked, actually. It was a helpful conversation as it has convinced me not to start running too soon, but I’ll inevitably ignore her advice. I’m already itching to get out again and I haven’t even started the final 3 months of chemotherapy. Before I start chemotherapy, however, I have to receive more scan results.

On Friday, I had another CT scan at The Christie, checking for tumours in my body. It is never fun attending scans, and the period in between having the scan and receiving the results is never nice either. I’m still feeling very in the middle of the treatment, so I don’t feel too nervous about it. I think it is quite unlikely that a tumour would have taken hold in the time since my surgery, so that makes me feel better. My life hasn’t really returned to normal anyway, though, so I don’t feel like I have very much to lose right now. If I heard another tumour had started to grow somewhere, it would just mean more fighting. I don’t feel like I’ve left that mode in my mind yet, so fighting on would just be a continuation of the current status quo. It’ll be much harder to cope with the scans if I get to 2 years clear, and I have established a ‘normal’ life again. That will be when it risks completely unturning everything again, like my original diagnosis did. For some reason, I feel like a lot more hangs in the balance in that situation. Perhaps this is all just me rationalising why these results aren’t too important, making me feel better about them. Who knows. For now, it’s back to work, back to scans and back to the ‘real’ world. Anna and I had a few days where we treated ourselves, but it all needed to end at some point.

Sorry for disappearing on the blog again – it was a very busy period. I’ll be back to it properly from next week, complaining about having my blood taken and delving into all the doom and gloom of having/not having cancer. I have so much complaining to do about diabetes that I’m considering writing a book titled ‘Don’t Lose Your Pancreas’, which would be all about how fucking annoying life gets if you do indeed lose your pancreas. Maybe I should call it ‘Dancreas Pancreas’, actually. It sounds like a spell from a Harry Potter book, though. Maybe I’ll write some fan fiction where the world of diabetes crosses over with the world of Harry Potter. Instead of having a scar on his head, Harry could lose his pancreas and then have to manage his blood sugar whilst he tries to fight 3 headed dogs and woo Ginny. That’s probably the only way it’ll actually sell. At least I’ve got a plan for the book now. That’ll distract me from the fact that the wedding is over and I’ve got scan results coming up on Thursday…

Another Day, Another Hospital Stay

10th September 2022 godley93Blog, Cancer, Diabetes, Health, Hospital, Lifestyle, Pancreatic Cancer, Positivity, Recovery, Surgery, Treatment5 Comments

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.

Delirium

6th September 20227th September 2022 godley93Blog, Cancer, Delirium, Diabetic, Lifestyle, Nurse, Operation, Pancreatic Cancer, Patient, Positivity, Recovery, Surgeon, Surgery, Whipple4 Comments

‘Delirium’ wasn’t something I was aware of before being in the hospital after my operation. For the first 5 days of my hospital stay, I still wasn’t aware of the term. If someone had asked me to define it beforehand I’d have probably said it sounds like a term referring to someone losing their mind, or feeling very confused. Perhaps I’m blowing my own trumpet a little bit as that would have been very close to the definition, far closer than I probably would have been.

The term was brought to me in the form of a leaflet, handed to me by my fiancée Anna in the morning after I’d had a dance with the ailment the day before. This was about 6 days post-surgery and was around the time that I started to properly consider the seriousness of what had occurred during the procedure. She had the leaflet in her possession because the nursing staff had given it to her the day before, to try and help explain the erratic behaviour I was displaying. My memory of the whole thing is very hazy now, but I’m going to try and recall what I can, whilst trying to explain how I ended up there, or how I think I did. Some of the blanks have been filled in by my family members who were present during the event, so some of what I write will be based on things I’ve been told, not direct experience or memory.

It is quite difficult applying logic to a situation that, by definition, defies sensible logic. My goal in trying to do so is twofold: firstly, to try and explain my understanding of what happened to my family who witnessed my quick mental decline that day, and secondly, to shine some light on a phenomenon that I was totally unaware of before it had happened to me. Also, in the name of the blog, it feels right to document both the highs and the lows of this experience, and this was probably the most volatile event that has happened to me so far. It far outstretches any experience that I have had in my life up to that point, and I am still processing what happened. I’m not sure I’ll ever fully understand it. It is the darkest place my mind has ever been to.

Delirium is defined by the NHS as below. They define the ailment, as well as the causes of it.

‘Delirium is a state of mental confusion that can happen if you become medically unwell. It is also known as an ‘acute confusional state’. Medical problems, surgery and medications can all cause delirium. It often starts suddenly, but usually lifts when the condition causing it gets better. It can be frightening – not only for the person who is unwell, but also for those around him
or her.’

I can vouch for the definition and causes. Everything descended extremely quickly for me, and everyone around me was pulled down into that negative spiral. For my mum, fiancee and brother Greg, it was probably incredibly traumatic at the time, and perhaps still is. They also did not know about delirium, and their introduction to it was a family member spinning out of control, accusing the staff of trying to kill him, pulling out lines that were stitched into his body and screaming accusations of medical malpractice at every person in overalls who came within 2 meters of his being. It is hard to describe how things descend to that place, but I’m going to try.

To provide some context, I had been moved into an individual room a few days prior. My stomach had been very bad since the operation, and the doctors were worried that I might be harbouring some form of virus that could spread to the other patients. I think that is why I was in that room anyway; this is all very hazy to me now. The room was small and only had two thin windows which, from the angle I could see out of from the bed, looked directly at a brick wall of an adjacent building. There were lines attached to my neck, back and hands, so I could not move far from the bed. The lines in my back and neck were actually stitched into the skin, so they could not be removed to allow me to move around. This is to secure them in, due to their important function during the recovery process. It all meant that I had been within a meter of my bed since waking up from the operation. It is also incredibly uncomfortable constantly having lines attached to your body. Personally, I started to feel sub-human, attached to all these machines and relying on others to do almost everything for me. I’d only just had the catheter removed, ‘upgrading’ to the graceful world of the commode… the world of surgery is far from glamorous.

I believe it was the Wednesday after surgery. That morning, I had decided to open my laptop for the first time since my operation. I don’t think that I intentionally set out to research how a full removal of the pancreas affects the patient that morning, but that is where I ended up. The topic had started to sit heavy on my mind. Prior to the operation, I had not been warned that a full removal of the pancreas may be on the table. I’m not suggesting that this was necessary, but if there was even a 1% chance of that happening, I do think that discussing it beforehand would have helped to ease the stress of hearing that it had happened post-surgery. Again, I don’t want to sound ungrateful for what has happened, and I am not accusing any individuals of doing anything wrong, but I would suggest that in future cases, this topic should be broached in the meetings before surgery if it is a possibility. It would allow the subject to process what that may mean beforehand when they are in a stable state with a normal functioning mind. I was processing the news in a very unstable state, with a mind being clouded by all of the painkillers, general anaesthetic and whatever else was being pumped into me. I had an epidural sewn into my back, a line attached to a central vein in my neck and various drugs being pushed into my system via the other lines in my hands and arms. Trying to navigate all of that, alongside the fact that I am now diabetic and have had half of my organs removed (Warning: major exaggeration used to gain sympathy) is bound to be tough for anyone.

At the time I did not realise just how much this was all messing with my brain, but I appreciate it far more now as I reflect. Looking back, I struggle to feel like that time recovering in the hospital even happened to me because my brain was so abstracted from my normal reality. I couldn’t focus on anything – I constantly felt bored, fidgety and I genuinely felt like the situation was never going to improve. The result was a constant state of perceived uselessness, depression and an overwhelming sense that everything was descending into a place of utter hopelessness. It was incredibly difficult to deal with and with every day that passed, I had a slightly clearer mind that was trying to process these things, which was actually more damaging than good in the medium term.

As my ability to think more normally was coming back, I was still under the influence of a concoction of powerful drugs, but I could not recognise that in the moment. As far as I was aware, I was thinking and feeling as I would normally, just those things that I was thinking and feeling were far more extreme and volatile than normal. Well, I was in a time of extreme volatility, so that doesn’t seem strange, does it? In this world, it is easy to find dark thoughts and believe them as logical truths, especially if you are the type of person who has a tendency to dwell on their own thoughts. I’d put myself in that category. It is far easier to identify this now, as I sit in a more normal frame of mind, but at the time, it was incredibly scary and depressing, feeling that my life had irreversibly changed and that I was on a collision course with death, simply counting down the days until my body finally gave in to the growing list of traumas it was accumulating. I was utterly convinced that this was the new me – a person defined by inconsolable grief, anger and fear. Grief of my former life, anger that this had all happened to me without my consent, and fear that it had set my life on a journey towards destruction and, ultimately, death.

I sat Googling ‘full removal of the pancreas’ and read on multiple websites that the procedure was extremely rare, that not a lot was known about it, and that the pancreas is involved in the regulation of hormones in the body which is not fully understood, so could not be easily accounted for post-surgery. The more I read about how uncommon the procedure was, how difficult it is for the subject to adjust to life post-surgery and the drastic changes it has on your body functioning, the more I convinced myself that the surgeon had used me as a lab rat. I created a narrative in my head – I was young and healthy, other than my diagnosis, yet I had stage 3 pancreatic cancer. The situation was incredibly unusual, but that presents a unique opportunity to those in the medical field. Why not try this experimental treatment on this young, unusual subject – it is the best opportunity to see how successful a full removal of the pancreas can be, right? I became utterly convinced that the dice had been rolled by the medical staff, and that my life was the stake that was hanging in the balance.

Alongside this, there had been some tension between the nursing staff and the surgical team that morning. I think they had been trying to hide it from me, but it was palpable. That morning, the surgical team had come to look at the drains attached to my stomach and determined that they could now be removed. The drains are two bags attached to pipes which are inserted into your body. They are there to allow any excess fluid to drain out of your body. The bags then have a plastic valve end which can be opened, allowing them to be emptied out. I had a drain in either side of my stomach, one on the right and another on the left. Although they were collecting a lot less fluid at that point on day 5 post-surgery, they were still amassing a fair bit of liquid each day. After the surgical team had inspected it, they had asked the nurses to remove the drains. I could immediately tell that the nurses were unsure about doing this and felt their hesitation. I waited for a few hours that morning, but the nurses did not follow through on the request. They were speaking to each other in their native language a lot, and I could sense some unease in the air.

A little later on, one of the surgical team returned and asked why they had not been removed. I responded that I wasn’t sure. She then left the room. A bit later, I heard a conversation outside the room where another member of the surgical team was complaining about the nursing team letting down the very good reputation of the HPB unit at Manchester, which was “one of the best in the world”. The whole thing felt very manufactured and I lay there confused about why they were having such a conversation in close proximity to a patient. It was all a bit unusual. Eventually, the nurses did remove the drains, but they seemed very hesitant about it. I think they had my best interests at heart, and they felt that too much liquid was still coming out to remove them, but they are ultimately there to carry out the wishes of the surgical team, who are far more experienced and knowledgable in these areas.

Between my research that morning and the sense of tension building among the medical staff, I was starting to feel very uneasy. By the time my mum and Anna showed up to visit me at around 13:30, I had wound myself up too tightly, to a level that I could not be unwound. I was still conscious and thinking somewhat straight at this point, though. As soon as they entered the room, I asked them to close the door. I told them about my theory, how they had done an experimental procedure on me and that I was being used as a test-case for a new type of treatment that they had little evidence of whether it would be successful or not. I told them that we need to try and get me to another hospital to be treated and give me the best chance of long-term survival…this is where I started spiralling a little more into madness, and where my memory starts to get hazy. Anna and my mum were listening to me clearly at this point, though, and they were very concerned.

I can’t remember how it happened, but the staff started to realise that something was going on. As they realised the seriousness of what was beginning to occur, more senior members of the surgical and nursing teams started to show up to try and calm me down. This only encouraged me – in my mind, they were realising that their plan had been foiled and they were now terrified that they were going to be going to prison for malpractice, or at least exposed and their careers were over… That is genuinely what I thought. By the time my surgeon himself showed up, I was absolutely certain that they were terrified that I had exposed them. I started to get my phone out and record them. Accusations were starting to come – I told them that they hadn’t been managing my diabetes properly and that my blood sugars had been incredibly high. I started to demand that they show me all of my data, as they had been regularly testing my blood sugar levels which were recorded on a system. When they told me that they couldn’t because of data laws, I felt even more firm in my beliefs. They were scared that the data would expose them, I thought. By this time, I was fully spiralling out of control.

At some point, I turned and looked at the machines behind me which were hooked up to my body. This is where my brain was starting to bend reality. I thought I saw the number ‘9999’ on a monitor and thought the doctors were loading my body with insulin to force me into a coma and kill me, so they wouldn’t be exposed for what they had done to me. It is here that I panicked and started to believe that they were really trying to kill me. I ripped the stitched lines out of my neck and back, something which makes me sick to my core in my normal state of mind. The doctors all screamed out and started panicking… this was starting to get serious, and they were now treating me like a danger to myself as well as them. People do all sorts of things when in a state of delirium, including physically assaulting staff and trying to harm themselves. Of course, I didn’t know what delirium was at the time, and I didn’t see their distress as them being genuinely concerned for me. Everything was feeding my central theory – they were trying to save their skin, and my hard-hitting accusations were threatening their reputation as professionals.

Around this time, my brother Greg was strolling onto the ward to visit me. It’s here that my memory gets very hazy. I remember running up and down the corridor in the ward, blood dripping from my neck and back. Security guards were blocking the exit but I couldn’t get out anyway as it was now locked. I was crying, pleading with Anna, my mum and Greg. “Do you not love me?” I was shouting at them, pleading with them to believe me. Anna was telling me that she believed me, but that I needed to let them help me as I needed immediate medical attention. I didn’t believe her. Greg was crying now and begging me to stop. The little memory I have of it is really horrible. I can’t imagine how it was for them.

All that I really remember from this point on was feeling like I had ruined my life. I had climbed up to a place which was impossible to come back down from, or so I thought. I was convinced that I was either going to a police station or an asylum. The people who had helped me, the doctors, nurses and surgical team, wouldn’t want to help me now anyway, whether they had used me as an experiment or not. It felt like I’d dug my own grave in taking this course of action, and now I had to lay in it. I remember running up and down the corridor, my head feeling like it was going to explode. Anna was going to leave me, my family were going to abandon me, I’d ruined everything. The world was genuinely spinning. I can’t imagine what my heart rate was when all of this was going on, but I bet it was dangerously high. Amped up on drugs and totally out of control, this is where any memories I have of the event end.

Anna tells me that the staff got me a seat and told me to sit down in the corridor. I did this, but then saw a doctor coming up behind me with a needle, which made me jump up and panick. When I jumped up, I spilt some water that I had in my hand all over the floor and then slipped over violently. Finally, the doctors managed to inject me with a sedative. As it took hold of my body, I started to calm down and apologise then, eventually, I must have slipped into a sleep.

I had a lot of very unusual yet vivid dreams. They were vivid at the time, but I don’t remember them well now. My amazing brother Greg stayed with me for 8 hours that day – he was incredible throughout my stay in the hospital, visiting me nearly every day no matter how depressing my company was. I’m not sure if I dreamt this or not, but I think I remember waking up momentarily and begging Greg to get them to kill me. I thought my life was over anyway – I just wanted it to happen as quickly as possible.

One of the dreams that I remember was being stuck in a dark room. There is an episode of the dystopian show Black Mirror where they discover a new method of punishment. It is where they can manipulate a person’s brain to make them feel like they are locked in a room for hundreds, thousands, even millions of years, in a matter of seconds. Despite them not actually being locked in a room, the subject experiences being trapped for that amount of time. I had a dream that that exact thing was happening to me. My mind was screaming to wake up, but I couldn’t. I genuinely thought I’d fallen into a state of absolute madness. I gripped my head and pushed my fingers into my eyes but nothing changes. It was agony.

Rather disgustingly, whilst I was passed out, I was apparently repeatedly ‘soiling’ and ‘wetting’ the bed. The nurses were having to clean it up whilst my brother, mum or Anna, whoever was taking the shift of sitting with me at that time, temporarily stepped out of the room. It is pretty horrific to learn these details and I really debated whether I wanted to include them in here, but I think it emphasises just how dark things can get in this state. My family had to witness it and the incredible nurses probably did not even see this as a ‘standout’ event – it is probably just another day for them. I really don’t understand how they do it. Hopefully, by speaking about it, it emphasises what amazing people are working in these jobs, and how brutal the day to day reality of it can be.

When I eventually woke up, it was the next morning. Anna was asleep in the chair next to me. I thought that I had dreamt the whole thing, but I felt immeasurably happy that it was over anyway. It was only when Anna passed me the leaflet titled ‘Delirium’ that I started to realise it had all actually happened. I couldn’t believe that the hospital staff still wanted to treat me, or that my family still wanted anything to do with me. A sense of total gratitude came over me – I felt so happy, like I’d been given a second chance at life, though I could barely comprehend what had happened. I still can’t, really.

Apparently, Delirium is fairly common. I read somewhere that it happens to about 1 in 10 people who undergo major surgery. It is more common in older patients, the same as pancreatic cancer, so of course I had to experience it. I’m always looking to break down these age barriers – perhaps that makes me a hero, who knows. All I know is that being in that state was the scariest thing that has ever happened to me, and for a short period of time, I truly felt that I was experiencing what it was like to be insane, having people look at you like an unpredictable animal, unbound by any social convention or sense of self-preservation. Everything was off the table and I was certain that I had set myself on a course to total destruction – resulting in me rotting in an asylum, prison, or some other institution, with no medical team willing to help me, and with certain death on the horizon.

I want to re-emphasise the gratitude that I have for everyone who cared for me at Manchester Royal Infirmary, especially those who were dragged into this episode. I can’t imagine what it is like for them to sit through the accusations, the impulsive actions and traumatic consequences of them, but I was relieved to hear that they had commented on how surprisingly respectful I’d remained through the whole episode, never swearing or threating them with physical violence. It is a pretty low bar when it comes to Delirium, apparently. I’m also lucky to have the most incredible family around me – my mum, Anna and Greg were all incredibly supportive. Greg was back at the hospital with me the next day, and we were laughing about what happened, with the surgeon even visiting me at the same time and joining in the banter. “Still think I’m trying to kill you?” He jested as he popped his head around the door.

It is all still very strange and it feels like the little parts that I remember didn’t happen to me – almost like they are scenes from a film that I have watched or something. It is yet another chapter in the cancer journey that caught me totally by surprise, but perhaps by writing this, it might help someone else not feel so blindsded by a similar event. The words that have stuck with me from the surgeon the following day, when we were passed joking about the incident, was this – “For you, this situation is not normal. For me, it is very normal. I do these procedures every week and I hope to be doing them more. If it is what it takes to improve the survival rates, then I want it to become more common.” As if I need to prove that surgeons are well-intentioned people – their entire careers are centred around saving people’s lives – but I thought he put it so simply and beautifully. Every medical practice had a dawn where it was not widely used. If I am an early case in a type of surgery that may help improve survival rates of this cancer in the future, then I am incredibly proud to do so. Even if I am a case that proves it is not as straightforward as they had hoped, I still contributed to something. Either way, I feel proud of where I have gotten to thus far, and I am starting to feel a lot of genuine hope for the future, despite all of the bumps in the road to recovery.

Cancer Free (Sturm und Drang)

25th August 202225th August 2022 godley93Blog, Cancer, Diabetes, Health, Lifestyle, Operation, Pancreas, Pancreatic Cancer, Recovery, Surgery, Whipple26 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

24th July 202224th July 2022 godley93Blog, Cancer, Diagnosis, Fitness, Health, Hospital, Lifestyle, Nanoknife, Operation, Pancreatic Cancer, Positivity, Recovery, Surgery, Treatment, Whipple30 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).

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The Chemotherapy Diaries

The Chemotherapy Diaries

The Road to Recovery

The Road to Recovery