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Out, damned squatter! Out, I say!
After a long day at the hospital for breast cancer surgery, I was eventually allowed home late in the evening. What a day! I had to rock up at the POCU (Pre-Operative Care Unit) for 7am, before being whisked off to the Nuclear Medicine department to have a radioactive isotope injected to help identify which…
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Some good news, at last
Well, this is exciting! I’ve just taken a call from the hospital and I am booked in for surgery on Friday 16th October, and I’m very pleased this has come around so quickly. After everything that’s happened over the last few weeks, having an actual date feels like a great leap forwards. There have been…
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Seriously ill, still me
The last couple of days have been a rather frightening reminder that I am, actually, seriously ill. I’ve just spent two days in hospital while they tried to get my magnesium levels back to something approaching normal. They had suddenly fallen to 0.34 mmol/L, against a normal range of 1.7–2.3. This was the fourth time…
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A Change of Plan
Well, it seems my body has finally lodged a formal complaint about chemotherapy. I saw the consultant earlier this week and, after everything that has been going on, they’ve decided that we’ve reached the point where enough is enough. The main chemotherapy is being stopped immediately and the plan is now to go straight to…
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Chemo day… with a little excitement
It was chemo day at the hospital yesterday, and things didn’t quite go to plan. My day started with a breakfast of a plate of various tablets, some fruit juice and cornflakes with ice-cold milk – about the only food that I’ve been able to tolerate all the way through. So far, so good… Treatment…
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Some very welcome news 🎉
I met with my oncologist today and he advised me that last week’s MRI shows the tumour has shrunk from 30mm to 17mm — this is such amazingly good news and, quite honestly, a very welcome morale booster. 🙌 Apparently, my case was even discussed at the weekly team meeting because I’ve been experiencing the…
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Cancer stole my identity
It is now over three months since my diagnosis of an aggressive form of breast cancer, and I had no idea how short a time it would take for this horrible disease to change my life and rob me of my identity. For over twenty years I have been Finance Director and part owner of…
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Missing magnesium and fingerprints
Last week was supposed to be my “good week”, being the phase in the chemo cycle when things are meant to be settling down and I’m supposed to get a few days to feel a little more like myself before the merry-go-round starts again. Except, somewhere around Wednesday, I started feeling progressively ‘not quite right’……
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You couldn’t make it up…
Anyone who knows me will know how passionate I am about our NHS. I appreciate that it has its shortcomings, but overall, I believe it is something to value, cherish and be proud of. This week, however, once things started to unravel, it became an unstoppable tsunami of bureaucratic errors. It all started on Monday,…
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The hair-loss dolly
I’ve long believed that children learn through play and, perhaps even more importantly, through each other. But sometimes life throws up things that are rather difficult to explain to little people. Like why Nanna Nat suddenly has very little hair. Our granddaughter is only two-and-a-half, so “Nanna Nat is having cancer treatment and it’s making…
