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?!