Blogging can be a great way to journal your experiences and share with others. Why not create your own cancer journey blog, or have a read of other blogs created by our members?
Unsure how to get started? Take a look at our help pages on blogs.
After leaving home I found it so easy to cope, I was sixteen and for once in my life I didn't have any stress. I just went to work, came 'home' walked my dog, and did my own thing. It was bliss. The only problem I had was that I knew that my mum missed me terribly. When I met up with her I could tell how discontent she was, she told me that she wanted to leave my dad, but she just couldn't do it, she got so so close, but changed her mind, to this day my dad doesn't know anything about that. My brother...
Today has been hard, but the feeding tube is now in! They took Ned down to have the procedure this morning after quite a gruelling, 1 hour, ordeal of trying to get a tube through his nose and down his throat past the tumour. When he got back to the ward he was really upset. The tube was put in under local anaesthetic, and he felt a lot of what happened. It really scared him, and he was very shook up when he came back. There wasn't much I could do except hold his hand and tell him how proud I am of...
Mum has just started a new chemotherapy drug - liposomal doxorubicin. It has just a 20% chance of working, meaning it only works for 1 out of every 5 people who have it. Mum says she will be that 1! I love her positivity, it makes a huge contrast to me. I feel incredibly negative right now, but I guess that is a coping mechanism.
As with all chemotherapy drugs, the liposomal doxorubicin comes with a huge range of side effects including nausea, mouth ulcers, diarrhoea and of course tiredness. But it...
I'm 50 so this may take a while.
Plus l have never written a blog.(I think it's an electric diary)
I'm rubbish with technology... so here we go.
Extract from 'The Cancer Survivor's Companion' (Dr F. Goodhart)
For most of the time you sail along weathering both the expected and unanticipated storms that occur in every life. Then, all of a sudden and without warning, the most horrendous storm blows up - much worse than any you have experienced before and completely unexpectedly. Your boat is tossed all over the place, you are lashed by rain and wind, the waves crash about you, their size obliterating the horizon and restricting...
The journey has started. It's been a hair raising few months to say the least. I have scans tomorrow to determine what OC is up to & hopefully the next course of action.
Having my tum poked about is painful enough, but the internal one, well. Last time, with a lovely nurse, she told me she was in her 60's, very spritely. I am walked to the scan room to be greeted with a male sonographer. I put my trust in these 2, implicitily. I have the external scan and then I'm to get into possibly the...
Yesterday was our first visit to The Christie Hospital, where Ned will be getting most of his treatment. My Sat-Nav took us a very strange route, so I will not be blindly trusting it when we go again today!
The doctor spoke to us about everything he had mentioned previously, and about the new nausea symptoms (which were thankfully not present yesterday though they have made a bit of a return today). He also put a camera inside so that we could see the tumour, and he showed us how it has grown but...
So this post is a bit about my family.
Mum is the eldest of three; two girls and a boy. Her Father was Polish and her Mother English. They met at the end of WW2, when my Grandfather was discharged from the British Army. Mum arrived a couple of years later. She met my Father whilst they were at school, Mum says their eyes met across an exam room! They married young (Dad had only turned 21 a few days earlier) and I arrived about 9 years later. Sadly, I was to be an only child.
Dad was also an only...
When did my life become a waiting room?
Like elastic under strain, my future has snapped back into the present and the horizon disappeared.
Life is shrinking, control is slipping, I am dependent on the whim of others.
Waiting;
For more tests
For biopsy results
For surgery (who would ever have dreamed of wishing away the days until the scalpel was wielded?)
And now
Waiting;
For recovery
For test results
For a jumble of unintelligible acronyms upon which my future depends (ER, PR, HER2, K167 now...
My father's recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer and his health is deteriorating more rapidly that we could have ever imagined. His birthday is approaching and he's been attached to the bed for the past few days. What can I get him? It goes without saying between us that he wouldn't benefit from material things, and in a position similar to this I would have opted for an experience more than anything, but given his health this doesn't seem like a viable option. This is one of the thing that...
