Would you believe you can not notice being hit by a bus?

It’s ironic, really. One of the reasons I started writing this blog was as a way of offloading the frustration that this illness and its treatment bring about.

And yet over the last week, I’ve been more frustrated than ever with things, and writing anything to put on here just felt like one unnecessary chore I could quite easily manage without. Far too much effort.

So having said last week that I wasn’t going to write a misery-blog, that’s pretty much what you’ll get this week anyway. No point pretending things are better than they are; the last few days have been probably the most frustrating since I started chemo.

What makes it that bit more annoying is that I’d got so far feeling OK. I’ve avoided a lot of the side effects I’d been told to expect – yes, if you were wondering, I’ve still got hair! – so being hit so hard right at the end of this stint made things that bit worse.

My sixth lot of chemo – the final cycle in this initial bout – began last Wednesday. On Thursday, I felt pretty good, well enough to drive, which is pretty unusual. I often feel as though I’m not quite aware enough to be driving, too dozy; I realise the vast majority of drivers on our roads drive in a worse state than that and couldn’t care less, but seeing as I’m on medication that suggests not driving at times, it seems sensible not to join them.

And on Friday – bang. At some point – and you wouldn’t believe this could happen without you noticing, but apparently it can – I got hit by a bus. To the extent that the weekend was spent either in bed or dozing on the sofa, with an inability to do anything else. You wouldn’t believe it was possible to sleep through Paul Merson’s appearances on Soccer Saturday, but apparently it is.

And this week has continued in a similar vein. Over the course of four days I managed three trips out of the house – to two different hospitals, and to the bin. And just to prove my point from earlier, one of those trips involved a grandstand view of somebody attempting to park their Land Rover, and reversing straight into my dad’s car. It’s as exciting and dramatic as things have got this week.

Slowly, slowly things are turning round, but it seems as though I’ve just been lucky so far and this week’s malaise is nothing unexpected.

Not long before I started chemo, I was out for lunch with my dad, and we were treated to an old woman sat behind us talking to her deaf mother about her chemo. Given the timing of things I’ve never been more tempted to turn round to somebody and issue the old dinner lady edict of ‘Less Talk, More Eat’ but the gist of her lecture was that chemo is essentially pumping you full of poison.

Essentially, it is, so I suppose that at the end of a course when you have been pumped with as much of this poison as they’ll do in one go, you should expect to feel a bit crap.

Still, it’s bloody frustrating…

The Things People Say...

Been a while, hasn’t it? Apologies for the lack of blog action lately. I’ve got my excuse though, and it is a reasonable one, honest…

Happily moseying on through last week, Wednesday morning suddenly saw some infection turn me from normal(ish) person to jibbering wreck within the space of a few hours. Sods law, of course, says that this happens while I was in Sheffield, not Leeds. So in the absence of the usual hospitals, off to A&E at the dreaded Northern General went I.

And how good were they? A few hours later, and they’d reversed the jibbering wreck symptoms and sent me on my way a different person. The after effects have taken a while to disappear and left me feeling pretty lousy. In the kind of mood, in fact, where any blog would have been a bit of a rant about hating the world/this infection/disease etc etc. Wouldn’t have been a fun read. And it would have been a painful, too-much-effort write. So it’s not even made it to the blog world equivalent of the cutting room floor, whatever that may be.

While the staff at A&E were reversing my previously overwhelmingly negative feelings towards anything Northern General-related (if you’re not from Sheffield, that’ll mean nowt; if you are chances are you feel the same!) the first doctor I saw did manage to throw in a straight-from-the-NHS-red-tape line. OK, so by the time you see a doctor (pretty quickly) you’ve already been triaged, so the doctor has an idea of what’s wrong. But is the first question he really wants to ask a patient ‘do you smoke?’.

Maybe it is if you’ve come in coughing your guts up. Seeing as I hadn’t, and seeing as I was in no mood for irrelevant box-ticking questions, the doctor was pretty lucky he didn’t get a longer, more colourful answer, than ‘no’.

Anyway, suitably informed by my smoking habits, not to mention my effort to explain my medical history (which I couldn’t manage with the help of my medical notes, never mind unaided), the doctor managed to do whatever the job that needed doing was. Fair play to the Northern General.

The week before that there was another daft inappropriate question, although at least one that at the time had me laughing. Fulfilling my second job – post office runner for my mum’s ebay empire – I went to a different post office than usual. I used to work with the bloke at the usual post office, so he never tries to sell me anything, we just talk football.

When you don’t know the bloke behind the counter, you don’t get asked how Crewe are doing, you get asked ‘we’re talking to people about life insurance today – would you be interested?’

And for some reason, this chap wasn’t taking no for an answer. ‘Why not?’ came next, and not feeling like relating the full story I settled for suggesting that they really wouldn’t sell me life insurance. Taking a hint and leaving it was obviously not this bloke’s strong point.

Their insurance was only a pound a week, or something. No, says me, I’d be paying a bit more than that. Still after a reason as to why I thought their life insurance wouldn’t be cheap and easy for me, I left him wondering, heading back out into the wilds of Headingley to dodge the woman on the mobility scooter who’d elbowed me out of the queue to start off with. Usual post office next time I think.

As you’ll know from recent blogs, I’ve now got back to work part-time. Most asked question since getting back into the office? ‘There’s only so much Jeremy Kyle you can watch, isn’t there?’ Yep, there is; fortunately in my case, none. Never watched it, never intend to. Even last Friday, when I was capable of no more than sitting on the sofa with the telly on all day.

Not that there’s much worth watching on daytime telly. Homes under the Hammer is passable; much of the rest of it merges into a mid-morning mediocrity melange. In place of the university heyday of early afternoon Bergerac or Ironside is instead Wanted Down Under, starring idiots who should never been allowed to consider emigrating. OK, so I’m jealous never to have the opportunity, but partway through the programme you get ‘I might miss my teenage kids from my first marriage’. Now I’ve got no kids but, you know, I reckon you might be onto something there. To make it even better, Friday’s family reckoned emigrating was a good idea by the end of the programme. With combined job offers of 9 hours a week at £20 an hour. Give me strength….but not Channel 4, where housesharing has taught me the need to avoid Coach Trip and Come Dine With Me at all costs.

In fact, generally, just avoid daytime telly. Like you should avoid red meat if you want to avoid bowel cancer, so we were told last week. Too late to bother me, I reckon that gives me carte blanche. Line up the steaks and bacon sandwiches….

A couple of weeks without a blog means no space for cricket, football or rugby league. What a shame that happens this week, eh?!

5 down, 1 to go...

OK, so as I write it’s technically only 4 and a half down, 1 and a half to go, but that isn’t as catchy. Yes, the chemo process (this round, at least) is starting to hear the fat lady warm up her vocal chords.

It’ll be sometime in March before I know whether there’s a follow-up round of chemo, but the way things look to be working out I might get a break from it a little longer than normal. Not building my hopes up, but we’ll see.

Perhaps the strangest thing about this whole process is that you have no idea whether or not it is actually working. While I have a couple of external lumps that could act as indicators for progress that seem to be shrinking slightly, that’s by no means a reliable test when the real stuff that the progress is needed on is inside me.

Having not really been well for months before my latest diagnosis I don’t have any feeling of being unwell with the cancer to relate how I feel now to. Over the last month or six weeks I’ve felt better than I have since before I went into hospital last June, and between then and starting the chemo, all I was doing was trying to recover from operations.

So at some point in March, I’ll hop (or possibly use a less sprightly movement) onto a CT scan bed and start ten days or so waiting for the result, having no idea at all as to whether the news will be good or not quite as good. ‘Wait and see’ has been a phrase by which I seem to have lived my life a lot over the last year, and it will come into play again.

So far I can’t complain about how I’ve done with the chemo side effects. There’s little bits and bobs now that can be attributed to it, but some of them (the really annoying ulcer you get on the end of your tongue, a few spots, dry skin) are all things that are pretty day to day anyway. The only thing out of the ordinary is a Gorbachev-style mark on my neck – although I really must get round to checking that I’ve washed there lately, thinking about it…

At least I am able to get out and about and do things that a few months back wouldn’t have been possible. I’ve managed to get away this last weekend to catch up with some friends and the start of the rugby season, which has been great. Less drinking than similar weekends in the past maybe, but that’s a price worth putting up with.

Yes, it was down to Cardiff for Millennium Magic weekend to watch the start of the Super League season, staying with friends down near Bristol, which allowed for a bit of culture that those of you who usually switch off when the sport bit kicks on might be interested in.

Although I didn’t spend too long at the ground, only seeing the Leeds game and a bit of 2 others, my overall impression was that it was a successful event worth repeating again – in advance I expected it to be a pretty poor spectacle that would get ditched after this year. The event is never going to sell out a ground that size, and that shouldn’t be the target, but it does seem a shame that anybody local going along just out of interest not only a) has to pay far more than Super League season ticket holders but b) if they find themselves hooked by what they’ve seen, having so far to travel to see another game.

Obviously from a Leeds point of view, it was good to see the season start with a win. It was extremely sweet that that win came with such a dramatic late flourish and in the manner it did – laughing at the Bulls last minute Cardiff heartbreak once again. And how ironic that our ‘get out of jail’ card was handed to us by Gareth Raynor, a player who knows plenty about that subject…

It was very encouraging to see some flashes of brilliance from Rob Burrow, who is perhaps due a big season. Ten years on from his Leeds debut, maybe he can thrive with the extra early season responsibility he will shoulder in the absence of Danny McGuire.

Less encouraging, and to be returned to in a future piece, were the pink boots of Brent Webb and Ryan Hall, together with their pink and blue socks. Just not right.

And an unexpected bonus while our winning penalty try was being considered – a new piece of video ref music! After years of the same predictable music whenever the ‘square in the air’ is drawn our winning score was considered with the backdrop of Ian Brown’s Stellify. Well done to whoever came up with that – more where that came from please!

Finally on rugby league, well done to Wakefield on getting their new owners. Anybody reckon this will be any different, though, to the time their benefactors signed players like Steve McNamara (back in the days when he was a good player, rather than just a poor choice as national coach) only to find that actually his big cheque was just the wrapper off a tin of Tesco Value Peach Halves? No, me neither.

Sporting action for me this weekend will be the Track Cycling World Cup in Manchester. Well worth a watch on your BBC red button all this weekend.

Milestones

Plenty of milestones passed this week. I’m now well over halfway through the initial chemo process, with 4 of the 6 cycles over and done with.

And I’ve managed to make plenty of other progress over the last week, with a real sense of ‘returning to normal’ (no sniggering at the back) at last.

After what seems like a ridiculous length of time off, I’ve finally managed to get back to work. I’m only working part-time to start off with and phasing myself back in gradually, but a start is a start. Walking back into work on Monday morning felt very strange – I was going to say a cross between your first day at school, and walking to the executioners chair. But one of those I can’t remember, and the other I’ve clearly never experienced. And it’s doubtful anybody ever caught the number 73 bus partway to the executioners chair so as not to wear themselves out.

So that’s two milestones. I’ve passed two more as well – one as a direct result of the other, the Milestone being my local pub (although I’m sure they prefer ‘one of Ramsay’s Best Restaurants’ rather than ‘local pub’ as a descriptor) and having walked past it numerous times since moving back to my flat part-time. Yep, finally capable of living on my own again…!

So back to work, back to my own flat, and capable of holding down a bit of a social life again. Not the worst of weeks really.

Moving on, a bumper extra bit of sport for you this week. I realise this is where some of you switch off and lose interest – sorry and all that. But be warned – one week I’ll throw some non-sport stuff in later on. And there’ll be a test on it the week after.

But yes, back to the sports stuff, and the return of Super League. I’ll be down at Cardiff this weekend for the dreadful shirt parade as all 7 fixtures take place at the Millennium Stadium. It should be a good spectacle, and provide an interesting and unique start to the year.

I’ll be honest – I’m only bothered about seeing Leeds v Bradford this weekend, the derby formerly known as the biggest game in rugby league. It’s given us a genuine magic moment in the past with our dramatic late victory in 2007 and has been good to Leeds with 4 wins from 4 weekends so far. I wish I was confident that record will extend, but I see this as the first game of a transitional season for Leeds. A new coach, key players out for the start of the season, and new signings that don’t look like setting the league alight. Saving grace for Leeds this weekend may be that Bradford are going through more upheaval – they can’t be worse than they have been recently though, and could be a surprise package come the play-offs. Hopefully they won’t settle down too early…

Wigan must be favourites to defend the title they won last year, and I expect Warrington to run them closest. But I’ve a feeling those two could have a season a decent bit clear of the rest of the pack – Saints, ourselves and Huddersfield closest to getting on terms for me.

There’s new grounds to visit for Super League fans this season. St Helens pitch up at their new ground at last – oh no sorry, they’re squatting at Widnes for the year. Well, it helped break Wigan’s trophy drought, so you can’t blame them for trying. Then there’s Castleford at their new place, the Probiz Coliseum, and Wakefield – should they bother starting the season – now at the Rapid Solicitors Stadium. Although I have heard a nasty rumour that neither is a new ground and they are just the same shoddy heaps that last saw money spent on them around the same time British Coal were still opening new pits...

Some final things for my Super League preview. New signings to watch out for this season – Luke O’Donnell at Huddersfield, a State of Origin bruiser probably best described as no-nonsense, and Ryan Hoffman at Wigan, who could easily be the best signing this close season.

Two hopes for the season – firstly, that there is less focus on referees. They all make mistakes, they will all continue to. Let’s take the focus off the officials and accept that there aren’t any better out there. And however many mistakes they are making, your/our team and coaching staff are making just as many. Let’s just get on with enjoying the game. Second (no doubt pie in the sky) hope is that the increasing trend towards supporters claiming to ‘hate’ other teams starts to reverse. There will always be room for traditional rivalries, but the shitty, seeming need amongst some supporters, to hate everybody else is unnecessary and shouldn’t have any place in the game. More chance of Amos Roberts winning Man of Steel but still…

I wasn’t going to mention anything else sports wise but I can’t not make mention of returned dope cheat (it’s OK Wigan fans, we’ve moved on from RL, it’s not Gareth Hock) Riccardo Ricco and his self administered blood transfusion. A great way to try and kill yourself, albeit one that ends up only killing your career and proving why life bans should be in place for dope cheats. Complete tool, although given the frightening parallels with an earlier Italian cyclist, I struggle to reconcile my hatred for how Ricco has treated the sport with my continued admiration for Marco Pantani as a cyclist.

Trying to predict side effects could send you barking mad...

Quite a lot of people that know me will know that I don’t like dogs. It’s an entirely rational dislike – some dog apparently put me in hospital while I was on holiday once. I was too young to remember that at all, but it makes it a rational dislike…

Ever since I’ve preferred to keep my distance from dogs, and whilst there’s a few of my friends’ pets’ I’ve got used to, by and large I still don’t like them. This includes dogs you encounter in the park who jump up at you while their owners bleat that ‘it won’t bite’. Well, to start off with, just because your dog ‘won’t bite’ (yeah, like you know it won’t…) doesn’t mean I suddenly want it jumping all over me. On one level I don’t expect people to understand, you can’t see my stitches and op wounds at dog-paw-jumping height; on another level that certain social failure dog owners fail to understand, I don’t want to have to put my jeans in the wash when I get home because you’re incapable of/can’t be arsed to control your mutt.

There is a point I’m getting to here. I’ve always been told dogs make a beeline for me because they can ‘smell my fear’ (uni lads – please read in Partridge-esque tone). Yesterdays papers suggest otherwise. Apparently dogs can smell if you’ve got bowel cancer! Now, I’m quite prepare to put my dislike of dogs to one side for a minute and say that that is one clever dog – either that or it’s a dog it’d be worth getting to pick your lottery numbers.

Anyway, it brings into question that ‘smell your fear’ lark. All this time I’ve been having a go at those damn dogs, when all they were trying to do is give me an early warning!!!

I don’t mean to scare you if you’ve noticed a dog spending rather too long sniffing your leg earlier on today by the way. There’s more chance of you having stood still too long and it having been a blind dog looking for a lamppost to piss against…

Moving on from dogs, it’s not long til the new Super League season – look out for my assessment of Warrington’s new centre/winger next week…

My chemo side effects continue to be as random as a Rowntree’s Randoms advert. There seems to be no pattern at all now, with the last few days of the latest two-week cycle being by far the worse of the last few cycles.

Today has seen cycle 4 start – into the second half of the initial programme, which is one landmark reached and passed. And whereas two weeks ago I just wanted to sleep on ‘day one’ and came home from hospital capable of doing nowt more than lazing on the sofa watching crap on the telly, today I’m feeling fine and up to knocking out this literary masterpiece.

You may have noticed that cricket, and, this midweek, football as well, have been noticeably absent from any comment in the blog. Space restraints. Sorry. Sure you understand.

Just one final thing. If anybody from the UCI is reading, regarding Alberto Contador. Drugs cheat = 2 year ban. Just sort it, OK?

Until next time…

An educational blog...

I’ve had this blog three-quarters written for the last few days, so I figure I really ought to finish it off and publish it. By way of a change, having built that excitement and anticipation, this week you are getting an educational blog. No groaning at the back…

Following on from chatting to a few people, I thought I’d do an educational blog that gives a bit more detail about what my chemotherapy process actually involves.

Despite all the statistics there are about how many people’s lives are touched by cancer, I bet there are relatively few people who know that there are so many different kinds of chemo, or ways of administering it. Two years ago, I certainly didn’t. I suppose if asked I’d have said that chemo was given on drips, in hospital wards, to people whose hair fell out and whose skin turned yellow. It’s nothing I’d given any real thought to, but thinking back that was how I thought of it.

Turns out I was wrong. My first experience of chemotherapy, when I was first diagnosed back in summer 2009, was tablets. A tablet with your breakfast and one with your tea each day for a month or two and that was your chemo done. It all seemed slightly unreal. As I was having radiotherapy at the same time it was hard to tell what the side effects of that form of chemo actually were, but it was a type of treatment I never realised existed.

To be honest, and this will probably sound a bit bizarre, having had chemo by way of tablets I felt a bit of a fraud saying afterwards that I’d had chemotherapy. Surely that was a light touch, not the ‘proper’ stuff?

Anyway, this time round, there’s no tablets, and to start off with there is a hospital ward and a drip, so I guess it must be the proper stuff! Every two weeks, initially for three months, I go into hospital for a morning’s worth of treatment. Having had blood tests the day before to check I’m OK for the treatment to go ahead, the first drug is rigged up and pumped straight into me through a Hickman line. This is planted somewhere under my collar bone, taking the drugs straight into my bloodstream.

In the half hour that first drug (irinotecan, if you’re interested) is being administered, I’ll generally feel pretty tired or sick. Then it’s onto 2 hours worth of something else – not an actual drug this time, and to be honest I can’t remember what it is (which kind of dilutes the educational value of this blog, but there you go…). Anyway, it must be needed to set things up for the final drug.

This one, which goes by the catchy name of 5FU, takes the next 48 hours to administer. The hospital start off the process, and I get given a pot to take home with me (important use of the word ‘a’ there – they might be drug pushers, but there is a line to draw…). As you’ll see from the photo below, in the pot there’s a balloon, which at the point the picture was taken had pretty much fully deflated. The drugs are in the balloon and by some form of air pressure are passed on into the Hickman line. I have that attached for 2 days and once its gone, that’s it, job done for the next two weeks. 

So that’s it. A few hours sat in hospital with a dripstand, but most of the time while I’m having chemo I can carry the stuff round with me and carry on as normal. Not really what I expected again but there you go.

So that’s two different kinds of chemo that I’ve had. No doubt there are endless more – you see people on the ward who are there for much shorter, and much longer times. But hopefully that gives you a bit more of an insight into what the chemotherapy process (or one of them) is.

Final educational thing – my Tour Down Under prediction last week. No shootout between the big sprinters, just as I said, but a couple of great results for South Yorkshire’s Ben Swift. A great way to start the season!

Barbers, brawls and bikes...

After some medical drama? Well, you’re in luck then. ER, or failing that Quincy or something, is bound to be on some cable channel that you’ve got this evening. Because there’s no medical drama to report here…

The two weeks since the start of chemo round two have been a bit of a waiting game, and I suppose it’s a bit of a good news/bad news scenario. In a way I was hoping the side effects of my treatment would settle down into a regular pattern. That they haven’t could be taken as bad news. However the good news is that I have felt far better over these two weeks than I did after the first bout of treatment. So, if a regular pattern does develop, I hope it’s one that follows round two, and not round one…

The lack of side effects meant that I’ve spent a lot of the last two weeks waiting for something to kick in. I’ve been going to bed thinking ‘will it be tomorrow?’, and OK, I’ve taken a lazy attitude to getting up in the mornings, but at least I’ve been getting up every morning feeling OK.

That’s not the only waiting I’ve been doing. Currently I’ve still got a full head of hair (well…full-ish). I’ve been told all along that this treatment will make me lose my hair – with more emphasis on the ‘will’ than I’ve heard since the last time I heard anybody take the Cub’s Promise. However, it’s all still there.

I did decide to get 1-0 up on the chemo though, and revert to my Grade 0 haircut from back in my uni days. The barber wasn’t quite expecting the answer he got when he asked me why I was getting rid of my long, flowing locks (no comments please) for what was always known at uni as my thug’s haircut but I’m sure it’s given him a different story to use on customers all week since. Incidentally, I see little difference between my haircut at the minute and, say, Heston Blumenthal’s. But while mine gets described as a thugs’, have you ever heard Blumenthal referred to as ‘the thuggishly-haircutted chef’? No, me neither…

Anyway, back to the story, and I’m still waiting for my hair to start to disappear. If the waiting goes on much longer, I’ll get a blog competition out of it…

I finally managed to get over to Gresty Road for the first time this season on Saturday. And what a day to get there for, with a belting 2-1 win over local (and promotion) rivals Port Vale. Good to see an Alex side playing some decent football with confidence. The rest of this month should show whether those promotion hopes are realistic or not. But it’s great to see a team featuring so many Crewe-developed youngsters suggesting that they can have a real say in the promotion shake-up come May.

More disappointing, but not surprising, was the police presence, amount of bother and number of arrests surrounding the game. Nowhere is yet reporting the ages of those arrested but I’ll bet the majority were between 16 and 21. I doubt any of this was real hooliganism as distinct from a bunch of Johnny Gobshites who can’t handle their beer getting a bit too jumped up. Unfortunately arrests at football in this style are only going to continue to increase. This might be wishful thinking, but football needs to get itself to a situation where segregation can be removed. It’s impossible to go much further without mentioning in a Daily Mail-stylee the lack of respect, breakdown in society etc – but this combined with the opportunity to bait similarly minded kids from a carefully segregated distance has now evolved into kids old enough to drink and try and have a bit of a brawl with each other. It’s not just a football issue. The increasing use of segregation in rugby league has made atmospheres worse at rugby games. At the current rate, within 5 years rugby league will be facing the same ‘for the wrong reason’ headlines that Crewe v Vale faced this weekend.

Moving on from football, and the cycling season starts in earnest this week. Or in Adelaide to be more precise, with the Tour Down Under. It’ll only be a phoney start, despite the hype of Cavendish v Griepel v Farrar. Handbags at ten paces rather than a real shootout between them I’ll bet. Still, it will be good to see some cycling on the telly once again, and it gives the annual opportunity to play the Willunga Hill Drinking Game. Make up your own drinking rules, bearing in mind this is South Australian wine country they are riding through, but based around every time Phil and Paul mention ‘the big Willunga Hill’. They’ll be bigging it up all week. The challenge will be to notice when they’ve finally gone over it…