December 2019

1 minute read time.

In the 3rd week of radiotherapy I come down with a cold which made it a tough week to endure and then in the 4th week most of my hair fell out literally in one wash. I expected it to slowly come out and thin but wasn’t quite expecting how rapidly I went from a full head of hair to friar tuck look! Shaved the rest of my head (which apparently, I wasn’t meant to do as it can affect the fitting of the radiotherapy mask – luckily my hair was very short when I had the mask fitted so it didn’t affect the alignment settings at all).

Attended a group therapy session for the 1st time aimed at patients who had recently undergone surgery for a Brain Tumour. Unfortunately nearly everyone in the session had a benign tumour and were significantly older than me, so hearing how that most of them had already been living with it for several years and had many more years to come was quite difficult to listen to when comparing with my own diagnosis. Though hearing how other people were coping with recovery and different types of drugs was useful.

Dealing with the end of the radiotherapy treatment and having family and children off school while still having the last few doses of radiotherapy over Christmas was certainly challenging. Also taking the chemotherapy tablets for over 40days straight had killed my taste buds completely so everything tasted completely bland, making Christmas dinner a bit of a washout.

The hardest bit was that my own personal focus each week was to just get through the next week vs my other halves focus of planning for Christmas, it did mean we did have a number of heated arguments over the month!

Anonymous