In my last blog entry detailing my background, I completely forgot to mention that the pelvic radiotherapy first time around damaged my hips, leading to my having to have both hips replaced, 12 and 16 months after treatment respectively. You would think I'd remember this, wouldn't you? Blame chemo brain! And also the fact that I was very lucky and both operations and recoveries were problem-free. But it's an interesting point that radiotherapy damages bones. Apparently it can lead to what are known as pelvic insufficiency fractures. When I saw the orthopaedic surgeon (I'm lucky enough to live very near one of the best orthopaedic hospitals in the country) he was quite worried that the surgery, which is pretty physical, might actually set up these tiny hairline fractures, and make a delicate situation worse. But, bless him, he searched Google scholar when I was with him in the consulting room (I laughed and said 'that's what I do, when I want to find something out'), and found a study of 58 men who'd had pelvic radiotherapy for prostate cancer and subsequently had uncemented total hip replacements (as he was proposing for me), and five years later the 51 who were still alive had good functioning hips and no fractures or bone necrosis. And on that basis he decided to go ahead! I found this quite amusing, but I trusted him, and actually he was proved right. I asked him whether I could go trekking in the Himalayas after the ops, and he said of course, no problem, in fact why don't you do the Annapurna circuit? Well I didn't because I wanted to see Mt Everest, but Annapurna is now on my bucket list.
One other thing is that 6 months after the 2nd hip I was pulled over on a muddy river bank by a small dog I was walking, and broke my wrist. Well, you couldn't blame pelvic radiotherapy for that, but I do wonder whether this had something to do with the effects of chemotherapy? Chemo can lead to loss of bone mineral density. Mine was such an insignificant fall on to a soft surface - why should it have resulted in a fracture? Well, I had a plate put into the wrist and recovered from it quickly - you can barely see the scar now, unlike my hip surgery scars which are pretty unsightly.
So these surgeries were minor bumps along the way, but it has added up to the fact that in the last 3 years since hitting 60 I've been a patient of no less than 5 hospitals!
