Week 4 - Day 16 - 'Looks like a girl but she's a flame'

Another long day in Milton Keynes today – third time in three days. I have managed to find a single advantage to this new routine, in that I don’t have to get out of bed as early as I do for Oxford, because the appointments tend to be around lunchtime rather than morning. The flip side, of course, is that I also get home much later. Today I left the house at 11.15am and got home at 4.30pm. The irony is they are telling me to eat, eat, eat, yet they are booking appointments at lunchtime, and sadly I am quite far past the ‘grab a sandwich’ phase.

My mouth is still like a blazing inferno so I saw a doctor today. He was a jolly American chap who was very keen to stock me up with a LOT of medication. He checked my mouth and confirmed that what is causing the pain are indeed severe burns inside the mouth, that will only get worse, and so the only way to get through the next 6 weeks or so is to take stronger pain meds. In addition, he would like me to use 3 different mouth rinses 4 times a day. This is getting complicated – I can feel a spreadsheet coming on 😊 not to mention the added complexity of being out of the house for more than 5 hours each day. Looks like I’ll need a portable meds bag now too. To complement all of these meds, I was also advised to take omeprazole to protect my stomach from the ibuprofen, and a laxative (thanks codeine). Cancer does not recognise dignity, clearly.

I was trying to describe how it feels to the girls today. It’s difficult to explain, because it’s not the same as a sore throat. I mean, my throat is sore, of course, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s burning. I feel like a fire breathing dragon (maybe it’s a Welsh thing?). I walk around with my mouth open to try to cool it down, desperately sucking the cold in air in to provide short but sweet relief to the raw wounds inside my mouth. It can help to try to imagine these were external rather than internal wounds (although you don't need to eat or breathe through any other part of your body so not quite the same). But for all intents and purposes, I look pretty normal. Well, that might be a stretch. I look quite haggard by now, but my neck hasn’t yet changed colour (that joy is to come) and it’s certainly not burned and peeling yet. I think perhaps one way to describe it is to think of the hottest curry you have ever eaten, think about how your mouth felt, that feeling when you really need something cold, urgently, to cool it down. Multiply this by 100 and deduct any cooling drinks and now you may be close to how radiation to your throat feels. Let’s hope the codeine does its job properly and this is the last pain post.

Today’s choice of music was Alicia Keys ‘This Girl is on Fire' - enough said.