It has been year and a half since I posted something on this blog. And when I posted it, I thought it might be time to stop. I felt I might have turned some kind of page, or perhaps I just needed to avert my gaze for a while. So I stopped blogging, and stopped my regular visits to the forum.
Don't worry, this isn't a blog about recurrence, I am doing fine. But my absence over the last year and half now feels like some…
Two years ago tomorrow I finished the last of 30 RT sessions. The two intravenous session of chemotherapy had also been completed. It was a hellish time. I could not eat or drink, because swallowing was just too agonisingly painful. The worst memory I have though is of vomiting up buckets of mucus from the burns in my throat. This would happen in unpredictable fashion and it seemed to go on forever.
All memories fade…
It will soon be a year since I received the conclusive diagnosis, after a biopsy, that I had cancer. Starting in the left tonsil and spreading to two lymph nodes, it was staged at T3 N2B. I had no symptoms. It came to light only because a sore throat had lingered after a cold, causing me to look down my throat with a mirror and notice that my left tonsil - the site of the primary tumour - was much larger than the right one.
I finished…
I have not blogged here for 6 weeks or so, the longest silence since I started my on-line scribblings. Mostly, it is because I have not known what to say for myself since I learned that the treatment appeared to have worked. I suppose that, since then, I have been experiencing a mixture of dumbfoundedness, huge relief, worries about recurrence and a sort of post-traumatic numbness. A bit like a rabbit who was caught in…
Today I received the results of my post-treatment PET scan. It seems like good news! No test is perfect and as my consultant said, I am not out of the woods yet - I will be followed up for five years to watch out for possible relapses - but the scan did not detect any obvious signs of cancer. In the wording of the scan report's conclusion, "the appearances are compatible with a complete response to therapy".…
