Five days and counting

Today I am in my fifth day of waiting for the scan results. I will know on Tuesday 3rd July if the cancer has spread. Surprisingly I don't know if its because I have cathartized my feelings on to paper with "Hell on earth", but i feel calm at the moment and able to get on with things. Well that's what I am feeling today......

Nuclear Medicine !

Today, I have just been to get all the scans done to frightening places like my liver. bones and lungs. I really hope they are clear.

My daughter and I go to a weirdly named department called "nuclear medicine" It has got the worst waiting room imaginable. Half the overhead lighting does not work...the paint has not seen a lick in 25 years and opposite where the patients sit is a huge picture of the most miserable looking faces possible staring into the miserable faces of the patients opposite...

I feel one of my feedback letters coming on........

Laid out in my flamenco dress !

The first night after being diagnosed is always the worst for me. My mind wants to throw up my funeral and what I will be laid out in. The last time it was my flamenco dress which I had to laugh at it was so tight i could hardly get it on for a flamenco performance I was doing. So how the undertakers were going to fit my bones in to it ......

My mind likes to give me the scenario of the hospice bed scene with me lying in state looking serene giving audiences to all my loved ones and friends.... What a lot of pretentious shite...the mind, never trust it....

I am feeling however the sadness and the anger at possibly having my life cut short. I don't fear death its just I have lots left I want to experience in life and dont want to go yet.... That's the struggle I have. It's not with death itself, that's inevitable, it's with the timing...

Feelings of Peace and Acceptance

My Doc tells me of some other drugs including chemo. I am thinking how much can my poor body take. I dont take any of the technical information in.....I just want my mammy I want someone to come and take this pain away its like being in a bad dream....

The Doc makes arrangements for me to have my organs scanned to see if the cancer's spread again there is a wait there is always a wait......

Just after walking out of the Doc's office I experience a feeling of enormous peace and acceptance that the cancer is here it aint going yet. It has to live around me not me live around it.

What I had been doing is living from one chemo to the next hoping that I can get back to normal in periods of remission. There is no getting back to normal. I have to learn to live with it even through the bad times there is no putting my life on hold anymore for when I feel better.

Life goes on and I will be playing it to the full whether I feel shitty or not.....life is too short and I don' know how much longer I have. I have to find a way of normalising this cancer.....

My daughter and I finally get away from the hospital and decide to go for a pizza. I hadn't eaten all day and I feel like writing to Pizza Express sharing with them what a comfort a "four seasons" pizza and a bottle of chardonany has been in all of my three diagnoses.

Results day arrives and I am scared

Today I get FINALLY the results I am so scared...I go to the ward where I get my Hickman line for my herceptin attended to. It's there when I notice I may have an outbreak of shingles...help I'm falling apart..

I am told that I need to stay in isolation till I am seen by the Doc for the results.

The doc comes over and I can tell by his face it aint good news the Herceptin has failed. The docs were looking to that to keep the cancer in check. The lump was cancerous and twenty nine days after the chemo finished the cancer returned!!!!

I am surprisingly calm, probably numb. This is the third diagnosis of cancer in 2 years. My daughter is distraught and for a moment my oncologist looks worse than me. We stay a long time in the "awfulness" that it has come back yes.... well hurry up doc what have you up your sleeve now.....

Hell on Earth 2

I sent "Hell on Earth" via my local cancer group to the Head of Surgery and to the Head of Pathology. I did also enclose a suggestion that a written explanation of the waiting times alongside an acknowledgement for the distress patients experience should be considered.

The aim of writing "Hell on Earth" was not only for me to find a channel for my anger, fear and sadness at the cancer possibly re-occuring but also to "wake" the staff up including my doctor who are colluding conciously and unconciously with the "this is the way things are round here".