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…

Happy 2011...

Happy New Year to you all, and welcome to 2011. Seeing as it’s weeks since the last blog, I’ve acquired a bunch of new followers, and people have been asking about the next update, I figured the blog ought to snap out of its New Year’s hangover and make a return.

Plenty seems to have happened since my last blog. Last time I wrote I had just finished my first chemo bout, and was waiting to see what side effects I’d be clobbered with. I’ve now just finished my second bout, and am waiting to see if the side effects will settle down into the same pattern, or whether I’ll face something entirely different.

It’s fair to say that the side effects of the first bout made me really hate this bloody disease for the first time. Overall it seems like I’ve coped with the chemo OK, so I shouldn’t complain too much, but being delivered a Boxing Day knockout blow where I hardly felt up to getting out of bed, I felt a resentment about having to put up with all this that I’ve never really felt before.

All of a sudden feeling ill wasn’t just something I put up with as a day to day occurrence – this was actually stopping me enjoying Christmas at home. Not welcome, not nice, and fortunately not something that lasted too long – just badly timed. If I’m hit with the same side effect timing this time round, it’s tomorrow morning that the inability to get out of bed will hit me – so I’m tempted to go with an extra glass of red tonight and blame it all on that instead… Realistically though, it probably means I’ve got plenty more shit days lined up to get through.

With my initial course of chemo due to last three months, I’ve got four more of these bouts to put up with before I find out what effect it is having on controlling the disease. Put that way, I’m now a third of the way through – doesn’t sound too bad, that!

Of course I couldn’t write this blog without making a couple of sporting mentions. Well done to the England side for winning the Ashes with a superb series down under. It’s been great to watch and listen to. For our Aussie friends asking us how to cope with not winning – you’ve only taken 1 win out of the last 4 Ashes series, so don’t go claiming the high ground too quickly. And there’s more to life than cricket – just think back to the 2008 Olympics and the track cycling. You took a kicking off us then as well – although I will accept that you were able to share that burden with the rest of the world on that occasion, and our ‘ringers’ were only Scots then… But maybe that’s one of the benefits of a colonial past, when people want to play for your country. Even when they can’t, they seem to want to do their best for us – witness Mitchell Johnson, bowling to the left, bowling to the right, and generally bowling sh*te…cheers cobber!

The Ashes and the FA Cup might have dominated the sports news so far this year but obviously I can’t not mention Crewe’s superb new year form. Three games, three wins, three clean sheets so far and thoughts of the play-offs and promotion are no longer daft and distant. Hopefully I can make my season debut at Gresty Road this Saturday v Port Vale – yeah yeah, big game glory hunter I know!!

That’s it for now, I’m off for that extra glass of red to tee up tomorrow’s hangover!