Adventures with breast cancer: Hibernation

Adventures with breast cancer: Hibernation: Sometimes this cancer thing really does creep up and knock me for six, never more so than in the past three days where I've been virtually b...

Hibernation

Sometimes this cancer thing really does creep up and knock me for six, never more so than in the past three days where I've been virtually bed-bound with feeling absolutely awful. The chemo side-effects of this cycle have been totally overwhelming, and I just haven't been able to fight it at all. Every bone aches like crazy, and even the strongest pain-killers only lift the edge of it. I'm moving around as if I'm 103, and the pain jumps unexpectedly from one bone to the next, like some really high-tech laser light show.  Then all my finger and toe nail beds have become a bit loose, and even the slightest pressure hurts like mad. Typing like I'm doing now really isn't much fun at all. All I can do is lie in bed most of the time, and I haven't even got the energy to adjust the duvet if there's a bit of a cold draught. Then on top of all of that, the killer runs started overnight, and I spent most of the night on the loo feeling extremely ill. The soles of my feet have blistered, so walking is very slow and painful, and my tongue has swollen, is really sore, and making eating and drinking a real ordeal. This evening, the skin in my mouth has started to peel as well, which gets stuck in an already very sore throat, so I feel like I'm choking. 

Then there's the total exhaustion, sleeping is all I want to do, but a lot of the time the pain just keeps me awake, so I just can't sleep. Instead, all sorts of thoughts flit across my brain, and annoyingly, the good ones seem to pass by and I can never quite collect them properly.

It's when I feel this ill, which has only happened a couple of times during this six-month-long adventure, that I start to actually believe that I'm not going to make it. Depression is lurking as an ever-present threat, but I haven't let it take hold yet, and will do everything I can to stave it off at the moment. 

Depression is the real enemy with cancer, and although it's fine to have the odd day when things just don't seem too great, full-blown depression is something that I'm determined to guard against. There is so much research that show that people who remain hopeful are more likely to survive, and I know that mental attitude is every bit as important as the pharmaceutical weaponary that's being used to save my life.

So I don't like the side-effects of chemo, but I have to remember that I absolutely love chemo itself. If it's doing this to me, it must be really obliterating any stray little cancer cells into oblivion. It's giving me a real fighting chance of being around to meet the grandchildren, and for me,  the only way to deal with the difficult bits of chemo is to  just remember that this is transient, and it's doing me stacks of good. Gratitude as well helps - 30 years ago there simply wasn't the technology to save my life, and even today, in many parts of the world, this sort of treatment simply wouldn't be available to me.

So, I'm trying to regard what I'm currently dealing with as a very precious few days of hibernation. A chance to just stop, shut-down from real-life for a few days, with a chance to perhaps think and plan too, and to count my blessings. 

A lovely piece of research I read yesterday really did bring this into focus. Women with breast cancer, who also have a strong social connection with friends, family and community, have a staggering 61% better survival rate that those who are socially isolated. If that's the case, then I'm virtually home and dry, because my friends and family have really stepped up to this challenge, and have carried me through the past few months with continuous love, support and laughter. WM though, deserves a very special mention. He is doing everything for me, and everything for my kids that I can't do at the moment, always with good grace, patience and humour. I have to get through this, and out healthy on the other side, just so that somehow, I may get a chance to make it all up to him.

Adventures with breast cancer: Soapboxes and Cosmetics

Adventures with breast cancer: Soapboxes and Cosmetics: I'm just starting to feel human again, and it's only 5 days before my next chemo, when they change the cocktail to Taxotere which, by all ac...

Soapboxes and Cosmetics

I'm just starting to feel human again, and it's only 5 days before my next chemo, when they change the cocktail to Taxotere which, by all accounts, is an absolute killer. I stupidly googled all about it earlier today, and from being merely frightened I'm now simply terrified. Taxotere is made from the needles of Yew trees, which sounds fairly innocuous, even for this needle-phobe. However the list of side effects seems to be as tall as the Yew tree itself, and some of them are pretty scary indeed. It sounds very clever in the way that it works, though, by blocking the cancer cell's ability to divide and grow, and whatever nasty things it does to me over the next few weeks I'll be hoping that those cancer cells are getting an even more miserable time of it. 

All I can do is shut my eyes, hold my nose and jump into the deep end and keep swimming til I surface again.  I had a great piece of advice this week, which was to treat this whole treatment process just as if it were a job. Except there isn't a "handing in your notice" option.

Debbie and Anita came over today, both such upbeat, happy people, and both left-handed ladies just like me. Three left-handers all in one room on Halloween as well, eh, but without our broomsticks? Once upon a time we'd have been burnt at the stake which would have left the world a much less jolly place. They are both coming to my laughter taster session at Mencap in a couple of weeks' time - with both of them there I really won't have to work hard at all to get the room rolling about in fits of laughter, all in all, a lovely afternoon, even though they did both tell me off for googling far to much for my own good.

Yesterday, I must have been feeling better because yet another news item managed to wind me up completely. There is a new Government-backed report that is claiming that the routine mammogram screening programme is "over-diagnosing" a significant number of women. Lots of people will read this and think it means that they are "mis-diagnosing" loads of ladies. They are not. They are claiming that, of every woman who's life is saved by having treatment, there are 3 others who have all the treatment thrown at them, but would not have died if they hadn't had it. What they fail to make crystal clear, though, is that there is no way of telling which of those four women desperately needs that treatment. The whole report reads like a piece of non-news, a load of tosh, where they seem to be suggesting that playing Russian Roulette is fine, and let's not treat them. Even worse, they are suggesting that the women themselves decide if they think they are in that 75% percent who might not need treatment. 

At the moment of diagnosis, and for several weeks afterwards, women diagnosed with breast cancer are in shock, denial and completely disorientated. To ask them to make that sort of decision will allow many to percieve that this is their "get out of jail" card. Who really wants to go through cancer treatment?  At that point in any woman's life, the temptation to walk away and kid yourself that you'll be okay is overwhelming at the best of times. This report could cause countless women to turn there back on treatment, with disastrous consequences.

Headlines that state that mammograms are causing 75% over-diagnosis will be misunderstood by a huge number of the wider population. Going for a mammogram isn't exactly like having a slice of yummy cake, and many thousands of women already choose not to turn up for their screening appointments. No one wants to have cancer, and there is still an almost superstitious belief that "if I don't go, no one can tell me I've got cancer, so I won't have it". What really happens of course, is that if they do have it and don't get checked early enough, by the time they can't ignore it any longer it may be too late to treat effectively. Surely this silly message is going to feed into this fear, and deter many more thousands of women from taking part in the screening programme? I'm not cynical enough to actually believe that this message has been released to save thousands on the NHS budget, but I can see why many people are thinking like this.

My own case, I hope will act as a salutory case to anyone reading who may be thinking about not bothering to get checked. If I hadn't gone for my routine mammogram (and I was sorely tempted not to bother) they wouldn't have found the two primary cancers, totally unrelated different types, one in each breast. Even on the day of surgery, the surgeon couldn't feel either of them, they were so deeply buried. The scans had shown them to both be tiny, very early stage, that hadn't yet spread. After two operations, including a mastectomy on one side, they found that both had spread, one of them was a whopping 14.4 centimetre spherical ball, and that cancer was already in 9 of my lymph nodes. I am now undergoing treatment with no guarantees of survival, yet I am in with a chance of beating this. If I hadn't gone, I would still be in blissful ignorance, but the cancers by now would have been spreading to loads of other organs, and within a few months I would have become incredibly ill, and it would have been too late to do much about it. Please please please never put off a mammogram, or any other cancer screening you might be offered.

Ranting over, but at least I'm well enough at the moment to stand on a soapbox. Well enough to be planning lunch tomorrow with WM and his sister and brother-in-law, well enough to have nearly contemplated going to the theatre tonight, and certainly well enough to watch a load of rubbish telly for the rest of the evening while WM loses his inhibitions shouting at the Chelsea/Man U match on the other TV. 

Something else happened this week that made me feel a whole load better. I had probably the best hospital appointment ever - a place on the "Look Good, Feel Better" workshop on Monday. It's a charity specially for women with cancer, run by the cosmetics industry, and we were taught how to really use face products and make-up properly, with tricks of the trade about how to pencil in our missing eyebrows, and tone done the chemo-related sideburns that are developing when the hair is falling out of all the places it's supposed to be. For someone like me, who has studiously neglected any form of beauty treatment and avoids looking at my face in the mirror to prevent both fear and depression, this was a totally strange, but strangely pleasant experience. I'm now exfoliating, toning, cleansing and moisturising like the best of them. There were 8 of us in the workshop, with 5 really encouraging beauticians, all volunteers, doing a great job of making us feel like we count and matter, and can actually look quite reasonable most of the time. 

There were two "best bits" for me. One of the beauticians is trained in wig-care, and he really kindly offered to cut the fringe for me so it doesn't go in my eyes all the time anymore. This means I can double the length of time I can wear it comfortably now. The other great treat was the goody bag, a huge cosmetics bag stuffed full of the sort of products I could never normally even think of being able to afford, and some of these things I wouldn't even have known how to use beforehand. It was also quite liberating to spend a couple of hours in a room with other bald ladies, and to feel totally OK and accepted. By the time it was ready to leave, my face was completely madeover, and  even to my critical eye it seemed passable.

So, now there are even more reasons not to tackle that housework of mine, because I'll need to spend so much time at the bathroom mirror to keep up the good work!