The Blog Christmas Special...

Is it really 2 weeks since the last blog? How time flies.

Since then, as predicted, I’ve found out more about my chemo and as I type the last remnants of the initial treatment are being pumped into me. I’ve got 2 days worth of treatment to be pumped in around about every two weeks, most of which fortunately doesn’t need me to be in hospital for. Too early to start talking about side effects yet I guess so we’ll see how they go…

There’s no doubting that the whole thing is a lot to get your head round – signing the drug authorisation forms and seeing ‘extend life expectancy’ as a reason for administering them isn’t something anybody would put down as a life goal. I’m quite sure it will get a whole lot stranger yet still but we shall see.

The start of my chemo had to be delayed by a week thanks to me having a temperature when I should have started. A minor inconvenience in the bigger picture of things but one that added to a couple of weeks where what I’m feeling like seems to be pretty much summed up by every word in the dictionary. Grumpy, dozy, confused, fed-up, upbeat, depressed, cranky…it got to the point where I tried to prove that every word in the dictionary did reflect how I’d felt lately. However as the first word was aardvark, and I couldn’t relate that to how I was feeling at all, that idea fell apart pretty quickly…

It’s been a bit strange looking forward to Christmas not really knowing how I’ll be affected by the side effects of chemo, or by any requirements for medical appointments. And now there’s the prospect of no Boxing Day sport to escape to either – the idea of Accrington v Crewe has been ditched even in the unlikely event it kicks off. The sub, Leeds v Wakefield, must be in severe doubt. You don’t warm up for summer rugby in -6 heat, and you’d have to question the sanity of anybody prepared to pay £17 to stand out and watch.

Staying with a sporting theme for a minute, if you were wondering after the last blog, Mark Cavendish did get my vote for the Sports Personality of the Year. Although the whole show & build up do give me a bit of concern these days. When it’s all plugged as Spoty all the time, I can’t help but confuse it with Superted’s 1980’s sidekick…

One last thing for you – if you don’t want Christmas songs stuck in your head, just change the title word of Dexy’s Midnight Runner’s first number one to ‘chemo’. Arguably not as effective as ‘you’ve got lovely hair, shame about your face’ to the jingle of the Autoglass advert but effective nonetheless…

It’s not, as you may have noticed, my most prolific or comedic blogging week, so I’ll leave it here for now. I hope you all have excellent Christmases and healthy New Years, and I will catch up with you all in 2011. Take care…

What, no medical stuff (well, not much)?

There’s only one place to start this week’s blog. By way of a change, that’s not some mundane Leeds hospital – it’s Adelaide.

I should point out early on that this is not just gloating to rub in England’s victory in the Second test early this morning at the expense of the Aussies – both resident and exiled – that I know follow this blog. No, there’s a number of ways in which Adelaide and the storming performance from Andrew Strauss’s side offer links to various memories.

5 and a half years ago, Adelaide was the last stop on my big Australian trip. Memories of happily sinking bottle after bottle of the locally brewed Coopers Pale Ale – undoubtedly Australia’s best beer, and no doubt sunk in quantity by the Barmy Army over the last 24 hours - in a backpackers bar seem two minutes ago at times, yet a lifetime away at others. I’m sure it’s going to be a bit of a challenge to visit similar places and do similar things again – maybe with a beer or two less this time – but it’s something to aim for…

It’s not long since such a performance on such a stage must have seemed a world away for Graeme Swann. A revelation in the England side, Swann has now given me a Sports Personality of the Year voting dilemma – there’s somebody other than Mark Cavendish worth voting for! The Adelaide test must make the spin bowler overall favourite now though.

Over the last week then, thankfully the focus for a change has been on enjoying myself rather than medical developments. For the first time in ages I’ve been able to catch up with mates somewhere other than in my mum & dad’s front room. That even included a Friday night – gasp – with my mates in a pub! OK, so it was only Beck’s and not Cooper’s I was drinking – this was Armley not Adelaide – and it may have been the same bottle that I was cuddling all night, but a start’s a start!

Later on this week, it will be back to reality as I expect to find out in more detail what form my chemo will take, when it will start, and how long this next course will last. Reading through some of the background information, it’s quite sobering to realise that one of the forms of treatment I may be offered is one which some people have to fight to get. I guess that’s just the harsh reality of the developments that are being made in these areas all the time, and at some point in the future I might be having a sail on the same boat.

Still, while I can I’m going to continue to make the most of being able to do things that were beyond me a few weeks ago – stopping up to watch the cricket til the early hours out of choice rather than an inability to sleep, going out for a full English and then admiring the views in the snow around Leeds.

A mad week, and a lost weekend...

I’m not quite sure if I can sum up what’s gone on in since my last blog entry without writing something the length of War & Peace. My original intention to update the blog last weekend got a bit snookered by an unexpected, unwelcome and pretty much unnecessary lost weekend in hospital, so there’s far more gone on since the last blog than I expected to be the case.

Starting at the start seems relatively sensible. You know it’s not a good omen when a Monday afternoon phone call gives you an ‘urgent’ x-ray appointment the next day – a day on which you’ve already got three medical appointments.

By the end of Tuesday’s four appointments it was pretty clear that things had taken a relatively serious turn, and that from nowhere my kidneys had suddenly decided that they had a big steak in how things would develop.

So on to Wednesday, and phone calls booking me in for an operation I apparently already knew I was going to have – I didn’t – but not only that, telling me that the operation on my kidneys was far more serious and permanent than previously mentioned. A lot to get my head round at this point, and things were continuing to move and develop at a pretty significant rate.

It seems pretty fortunate as well that the bad weather held off as long as it did, as by Thursday afternoon I was en route to my third different hospital of the week for a short notice appointment to tell me that the information about permanency of operations I’d been given on Wednesday was in fact wrong. The planned operation was only a short-term fix and so the huge issues with my kidneys which I’d been struggling to get my head around and had left me pie-eyed weren’t actually so serious after all. To get on with my chemo treatment in good time, I needed to be under the knife – at the week’s fourth hospital – on Friday morning.

That went fine, but a full weekend in hospital wasn’t exactly what I had planned. I wouldn’t have minded so much, but by Sunday morning nobody really seemed to know why I was there, and being in hospital when none of the doctors on duty feels the need to see you – even after they’ve been asked to – seems a little pointless. At some point I was ordered an ambulance, which turned up partway through Sunday evening to take me over to Jimmy’s, where I was due for my next minor op on the Monday morning.

Saturday and Sunday showed the NHS at the level some of the media would love to suggest they’re always at – understaffed on the nursing side, administratively incompetent, and serving anaemic Sunday lunches. Good job they’re not always like that…

Not being sure how long I’d be in hospital for (or being too tightfisted – you decide) I didn’t want to shell out for the TV or internet. So this has meant that over those few days I’ve started reading more again, and ironically have appreciated the BBC even more. Overnight there has been the text commentary of the Ashes to keep me up to date on my mobile, courtesy of the wonderfully named Ben Dirs and his continual use of the marvellous word nurdles. Then there have also been the podcasts I downloaded before going into hospital, including an inspirational interview with Test Match Special’s Henry Blofeld. Unfortunately it’s not online anymore, so there’s probably nowhere on the net you can hear anybody talk about what it’s like to ride a bike into the front of a bus that’s doing 50mph. Well worth the licence fee!

Monday morning saw my latest encounter with a surgeon’s knife. Only a local anaesthetic was needed this time, which meant that I was faced with the odd sensation of knowing the surgeon was finishing off my operation to mid-90’s dance classic Dreamer by Livin’ Joy. A very strange moment!

Finally for this instalment, it was the stuff Alberto Contador’s dreams are made of – the hospital wanted to give me a blood transfusion (and that’s just his dreams – the rest of my prescription list is beyond your wildest dreams, Alberto). So on with that, and seeing as half the world’s blood is donated by Team Astana, my thanks are due to them for being so generous with their blood giving commitments.

Not as long until the next blog update now hopefully – and hopefully there’s less happening in the meantime…

That difficult second blog...

So, I guess I ought to get round to my second blog then. And, as the Arctic Monkeys and Bradley Wiggins have found before me, the follow-up is never quite as easy…

Especially when the first instalment has been met with such a positive response. Thanks to everybody who has passed on messages since I started the blog – they’re all much appreciated.

Positive comments from people aside, I seem to have had a week of not really getting anywhere. One of the things I’ve got used to over the last 18 months or so is that waiting for the medical profession, or their admin staff, to move at their own pace is part and parcel of this whole process. That’s still the case, and yet again there’s another week coming up where, hopefully, I’ll get a clearer picture of things. But that’s by no means guaranteed…

As I mentioned in my previous blog, I’m not able to live on my own at the minute, so have spent the last few months squatting at my mum & dad’s. Probably not the easiest situation for any of us, especially on the days when I’m not sleeping properly, the frustration of things are getting to me and I’m turned into a grumpy, miserable houseguest from hell. That does allow for the odd unintentional comedy moment though.

In the spirit of trying to atone for being the houseguest from hell, I popped up to Asda the other day – a big adventure in its own right for me at the minute! – and unintentionally found myself doing the Blokes Shop of Shame. All of a sudden I’m getting the odd raised eyebrow look, and when it comes to paying even the self service checkout seems to be cock a snook as if to say ‘which one was it then – forgotten anniversary or unwise comment about her sister?’ Yep, without thinking about it in my shopping basket is a bunch of flowers and a box of Roses…

Anyway, moving on. One of the things that has really helped me over the past few weeks has been a referral to Wheatfields, whose medical staff have provided a much ‘bigger picture’ look at all the problems I’m going through at the minute and proved a lot of help. If, like me, you grew up in Leeds, you might remember Wheatfields for their fetching brown and beige stickers you used to get for giving them a few coppers back in the 80’s and 90’s. Must admit that thinking back you think that is as far as your involvement with them will ever go. Anyway, just so happens that if you live in the Leeds area, you can vote to try and help them get a share of an award from NatWest’s Community Fund this week. Just go to https://communityfund.natwest.com/Vote and follow the process through. Shameless plug, but from my limited experience of them so far, they’re worth a vote…

An Introduction...

An advert for one of those insurance comparison sites – I think this one is compareconfusedmeerkats.com – suggests that most of what the internet is used for these days is pretty pointless. For some reason, I’ve decided to contribute to that web of pointlessness, but hopefully in with the dull banality there’ll be some interest.

But why? I’ve not just decided to start my own blog because I feel that the web is desperate for the benefit of my opinions. To be honest I’m doing this to be selfish. No, I don’t expect to earn any sponsor money because companies will be falling over themselves to advertise here.

For the last three years essentially, I’ve been pretty ill. Worse at some times than others, and what initially was just bog standard Crohn’s Disease became more and more complicated before I was diagnosed with cancer in summer 2009.

18 months on, and not out of the woods yet, I’ve decided to start putting down some of my thoughts, and can’t really see the point of doing that and only letting them see my C Drive. I don’t think there’s any such thing as a ‘normal’ cancer patient – everybody surely deals with a very individual disease in their own way – but if by any chance reading what I’ve gone through helps somebody else get through their own situation, well, that’s a Brucie Bonus.

I’ll spare some of the more gruesome and personal details from making it to print. On the surface of it that’s because I’ll have so few readers that I don’t want to put off the ones I’ve got. On the daft side, it’s probably more because I’d be too embarrassed to put them into print (or whatever the equivalent term for the web is). Daft, because I look back now and think that had I spoken to the doctor’s earlier about some embarrassing symptoms, things in the Crohn’s chain could have been nipped in the bud earlier. Proof if ever it were needed that young blokes (and I was young at the time!) do themselves more harm than good by keeping quiet when really they ought to speak up.

In terms of where I currently am, I’m recovering from an operation six weeks ago while awaiting a date to restart chemotherapy. It’s been nearly six months since I could live on my own in my own flat, was able to go to work, or sat down and had a pint in the pub. I’m over the moon with the fact that I’ve got a whole week in my diary at the minute – a whole week!! – without a medical appointment - other than waiting in for my daily visit from the district nurse.

So through this blog I intend to keep a record of what I’m going through. It’d be daft to say ‘until I’ve beaten this thing’ because by then, blogs are likely to be a bit passé and old school and we’ll all have moved on. You’ll also get the benefit of some of my views on the sporting world – being off work and out of my usual social scene I don’t get the chance to vent those as often, so lucky you lot. If you only follow me online, you get the benefit of my wonderful sporting knowledge. If you usually ‘benefit’ from such opinions, you can now choose to ignore them with a clear conscience…

Nearly half past 9? That classes as a late night for me these days. Time for my tablets before bed…