Week 3 - Day 15 - Halfway

I thought when I reached the halfway point I would be popping a non-alcoholic cork in celebration of this milestone. Unfortunately, the pain is still radiating through my throat so there were no such festivities tonight. Rich reminded me that I have known this time would come, and he is right, but I guess I was hoping to get to week 4 or 5 before it happened. I also hoped I would be one of the ‘lucky’ ones who got off lightly and just lost taste or saliva, escaping the excruciating pain. Sadly it seems that’s not to be.

It was back to Milton Keynes today, so my already-too-long car journeys have now become almost twice as long. It took and hour and fifty minutes to get there, my appointment was twenty minutes, and then a return hour and fifty. I don’t have time to do anything else during these days, other than take meds and try to eat. I had some good advice this morning from someone who has been through this.

Right now, you are no longer "fighting cancer". Your doctors are. Your job has changed, it's much simpler.

1. Show up to your appointments.

2. Calories.

This sounds so easy - especially the calories part! Given appointments now take around 4.5 hours and every meal takes around an hour, it means surviving radiotherapy has now become my full-time job. I spoke to the head nurse today who is trying to get me an appointment with a doctor tomorrow to review my pain meds. I definitely need something stronger if I am to be able to continue to eat, but my concern with moving onto opiates at this stage is that they seem to render me like a zombie, so I would pretty much need to spend the next 2 months on the sofa, staring at the wall. I did manage to eat today, but it was both painful and stressful, so I can easily see why so many opt to use a feeding tube at this stage. That said, I am lucky I don't have many mouth ulcers and I can still swallow, so if I can get on top of the pain soon, I’m hoping I’ll be able to continue to eat.

In keeping with the current situation, I chose the song ‘Believer’ by Imagine Dragons today. I listened to it on my dog walk this morning and the lyrics jumped out at me –

Pain!
You made me a, you made me a believer, believer
Pain!
You break me down and build me up, believer, believer
Pain!

That’s probably enough said for today as I'm conscious I'm sounding very maudlin. Hopefully, by the time I am back from Milton Keynes tomorrow, I will have a goodie bag full of life-changing medication and things will start to improve. In the meantime, I’m off to torture myself watching all the delicious creations on Bake Off!