The severity with which one goes up and down is striking. You seem to make good progress and then wham! suddenly you slip right back down and are struggling again. Last week, which was the 4th post-treatment week, was a case in point. I had my first drink in a cafe for well over six weeks. It was only sparkling water but hey, I could drink it! I even went to the beach and paddled with the kids in the sea. But then it all started to go pear-shaped on Sunday evening when I vomited a little. It went seriously downhill on Monday afternoon when, walking home from a reflexology session, I suffered the ignominy of having to vomit into a roadside gutter. Thankfully, a fairly quiet street, but still, not something guaranteed to increase my credibility with the neighbours ....
That same evening, I ended up suddenly and violently vomiting out my nasal feeding tube, so yesterday it was back to hospital to have another one - number 3 - fitted. And of course I was feeling utterly drained and exhausted.
I am pleased to say that today has gone much better. The glorious sunshine has no doubt helped, but to my own surprise I added a little orange juice to my morning water and I actually ate something for the first time this afternoon. Hallelujah! OK so it was only half a yoghurt and 1/4 of a banana, but heck, I ate the stuff! This is the first time I have eaten anything at all since my last Ready Brek over five weeks ago. It is all painfully slow of course but it has to qualify as progress.
So that's the progress report. But what I am wondering about now is whether there is a pattern and a cause to the setbacks, which seem quite severe in my case. Now, I know it is normal for cancer patients to have setbacks, that there will be good days and bad days and recovery is not linear. But it does occur to me that in both instances where I suffered setbacks bad enough to entail vomiting in the street (yes, it has happened twice, hence my worries about the impression I am making on the neighbourhood...) I was walking home from a local reflexology session.
I do believe in complementary therapies. I had never had reflexology before I was diagnosed and have found it excellent. In particular my last session, where the therapist really mastered her craft and I entered a truly profound state of relaxation. I am therefore wondering whether that level of relaxation, combined with the stimulation the reflexology gives certain organs, operates in such a way that the body reacts by rejecting matter it wants to get rid of, for example remnants of chemo and in my case (because of extensive radiotherapy to the head and neck) buckets of mucus too.
My oncologist jokes about "snake oil" when the talk turns to complementary therapies, yet the nursing staff do not. She's a fantastic oncologist and I much appreciate her sense of humour too, yet through this journey so far I have had the impression that consultants/surgeons are generally sceptical about complementary therapies (reflexology, reiki, mindfulness and so on), at best regarding them as harmless, whereas nursing level staff often seem to have a genuine belief in their effectiveness.
A striking example of this was when the former nurse who manages the local complementary therapy clinic advised me not to have reflexology less than 3 weeks after a chemo session, because reflexology promoted the evacuation of toxins and the whole point of chemo is to poison the cancer cells even more than it poisons you. When I asked my oncologist, she was of the opinion that reflexology would not make a blind bit of difference and I could do whatever I liked with my feet. As a patient, inevitably you ask "Who is right?" This difference in approach, if I am right about it, must be partly the result of different training and above all different experiences at the two levels of health care workers. It is an intriguing thought that beliefs about how to heal might vary depending on what level you are engaging with in the system....
I would be very interested in any thoughts/experiences on "side effects" of complementary therapies as well as whether anyone else has experienced the difference in attitudes depending on level.
Sorry (genuinely) if I have been a bit too graphic for some readers in this blog, but one thing cancer can do is make you want to tell it like it is, to call a spade a spade.
