Back to hospital today to discover that without a morphine buffer IT chemo is quite an unpleasant process… still only two more to go.
Intrathecal chemotherapy is an intra lumbar injection, which in my case is a preventative measure (as the usual IV chemo doesn’t make the leap over to the nervous system, so should my cancer come back there would be a chance of it occuring there and , there is a far nastier place to have it than wrapped around my colon as it is now).
Anyway…. very unpleasant as although the local anaesthetic numbs the fleshy outer, you can still feel the needle in your spine…yuck.
This time I took much longer to graduate to sitting upright and had the added help of a saline drip to hopefully fend off the post lumbar puncture headache that last cycle had me headachey, vomiting, dehydrated and hospitalised before Christmas.
I’m also drinking flat coca-cola (the only way I can palate the blasted awful stuff) as its sugary, caffeine high is just the stuff to stave off a plp headache.
In my hours of lying flat (failing to drink tea through a straw, but managing to eat a prawn sandwich and some bourbon biscuits – thanks peristalsis. Ive been reading Stuart Marconie’s ‘Pies and Prejudice’…. nothing to do with cancer but a jolly good read, especially if you are from ‘the North’ (which marconie thinks begins at Crewe… and when I lived in Nottingham I always thought began north of the Trent)… its a well informed amble and ramble and gave me a real craving to eat a babies head for my supper (or to slip back to my roots – my tea).
{like Marconie I was bemused when my upper middle class future in laws invited me first for supper – cocoa and a biscuit? How odd and outré!}
A babies head for those not in the know is a steak pudding….a Northern delicacy… (the lack of which in Nottingham chip shops probably places it back in the Midlands) or soggy steamed suet pastry and mince (slice off the top and dip your chips in).
The nice man in Morrisons, Peterborough obviously had no clue whatever what I was on about and Meg and me plumped for a bit of belly pork instead (as the tinned Goblin puds we found without his help looked awful and had onion in – which I suspect all steak puddings might).
I’m starting a list of things to do when I get better…. see the pyramids?…. Pompeii?….Machu Picchu?… nah… a trip to Bury market for some decent black pudding and maybe a babies head at a decent chippy.
