I haven’t written here for a while. I have been recovering well, and have been spending some lovely time with my girls over the summer holidays. After 20 years of working every summer apart from those I was on mat leave for (and one I took parental leave), it is really nice to be able to enjoy the full summer with them for a change. Nice, but also exhausting as we have been doing mostly non-stop activities - I don’t think I have ever shopped as much as I have this summer! Add in recovering from major surgery and re-learning to eat and drink, and I am feeling quite tired.
It doesn’t really feel like a physical tiredness as much as a mental overload. Even though it has now been 3 months since diagnosis, I am still processing the fact I have cancer - or hopefully this is now past tense as I write this. I listened to a really interesting ‘You, Me and the Big C’ podcast recently, where a guest speaker joined who was a breast cancer specialist doctor, who had also had breast cancer herself. And not just once, but she has also had a recurrence. What she said really resonated with me - that it doesn’t matter what your statistics are, the mental anxiety about recurrence is the same whether you have a 10% chance or recurrence or a 90% chance of recurrence. It either comes back or it doesn’t, but you will never know if it will come back until it does, or until you die a different way. Sobering words that really struck a chord with me.
My odds in theory are really good, yet I am terrified of being in the recurrence bucket (as are all cancer ‘survivors’) especially as head and neck recurrence is so hard to treat a second time. I have to remind myself this is why I am opting for the adjuvant radiotherapy. But no matter how much I tell myself it’s the right thing to do, to increase my chance of long-term survival by making sure we ‘mop up’ any microscopic cancer cells that may still be lurking in my throat, I still worry that I’m making the wrong decision and that it would be better to ‘watch and wait’. Because radiotherapy brings with it its own risk of causing another primary cancer (usually a sarcoma) around 15 years after treatment, not to mention all of the awful side effects, again, more pronounced for head and neck cancer because of the location of the x-rays.
As I mentioned, most of the side effects are common, so it is highly likely I will experience some or all of them. Most people do. I’ve been told to try to gain some weight before treatment starts so that I have more to lose when it gets to the point that I can’t eat - creating a buffer so to speak. It’s not often in life you are told to gain weight so I should be happy about it, but like any of the positives of cancer, it doesn’t really feel like a positive. I feel more like a turkey being fattened up for Christmas or a goose ready to be made into Foie Gras.
My mouth is already very dry after surgery, and something has happened to my taste, in that everything is slightly less tasty than it was before surgery. This isn’t a great starting point as radiotherapy will exacerbate both issues, but my surgeon isn’t concerned and told me to suck sherbets lemons! How very scientific!
With one week to go, and to make the absolute most of it, I am flying out to Portugal with the girls for 5 days of sunshine, good food and wine. I had booked this trip back in March, before my diagnosis, and I didn’t think we would be able to go given my treatment schedule (I was meant to start on 29th but that turned out to be a bank holiday so it was moved to 31st), so I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to go after all. Maybe somewhere there is a guardian angel looking down on me - and realising quite how bad the past 1.5 years have been.
The
Portugal trip feels like the Last Supper all over again (see pre-surgery post),
and I have an ominous feeling in the back of my mind about what’s to come very
soon, but I am trying my best to push it aside so I can enjoy this time. I will
of course be taking sherbet lemons on the flight!
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