Well, after being nudged by the Macmillan on-line team I have just joined this group and thought I'd drop a quick line to say 'Hello' and give a little overview of my wonderful life - visualise the classic clown car that backfires and the doors fall off! I think that currently sums up our family but, like the clowns, we never stop smiling. Apologies, as this may be a little long.
My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018 and whilst chemotherapy has been very good at holding the wee beastie at bay, it did get a chance to spread and reach out into the chest and the lungs. She’s on daily chemo and that has been really good, bar some side effects, however there are signs that things ‘may’ be bubbling once again. It’s far too early to say but two lymph nodes are slightly enlarged with, we think, one pressing onto the nerve supplying her vocal cords. We found out only last week the left one is paralysed, and she’s had a chronic hacking cough that she’s had for 7 ½ months now. It got so bad she broke a rib at some stage! She’s coughing away as I type this. However, I have had a play with a bedside atomiser that I’ve used with some oils designed to help breathing. We’re four nights in and the improvements have been stunning to say the least, lots more testing to do to prove it but wow, she’s sleeping through the night now.
For me, I’m the lucky soul with Myeloma, a blood cancer that I’d never heard of before and represents around 2% of all cancers. I was diagnosed in 2019 and this double whammy hit our teenage daughter very hard, she’s still struggling with it now, although there are some promising signs at the moment as she starts to mature and move from school to college.
I had chemo that worked very well and brought my paraproteins down – these are the readings from the blood that indicate the general level of activity of the cancer at any point. We did however have to stop this early, as I started to lose parts of my vision in my left eye, we thought it ‘may’ be due to the chemo but there was no past evidence of the chemo used causing issues like this before. I had some high dose chemo followed by a stem cell transplant which proved to be a pretty brutal five weeks in an isolation room followed by around 11 weeks of being Covid positive – this was when it first really hit the UK in March 2020. I ended up with Long Covid for best part of a year I think, it was hard to tell at some points if the long covid or the myeloma were the cause of certain side effects. The other prize I won was that 24 hours after I had the high dose chemo, the vision in my right eye was also damaged so I’m now visually impaired. The worst thing was that I ended up losing my licence and when I was diagnosed, I was just about to take my advanced motorbike test to qualify to become a blood biker for the NHS – Bummer.
Roll forward to December 2022 and whilst I had reached a form of remission I was always in pain and never fully well. I could however feel a change starting and all the way through this year my blood readings started to show a rise of the dreaded paraproteins. I knew it would come back and it’s something I’ve not been afraid of; I’ve taken it head on and, in all honesty, I’ve had a really good run on the first remission.
I officially released in August 2023 and we’re watching the bloods to see when we start my 2nd line of chemo, as they don’t want to jump the gun and used one of my options up too early. So, as I have a little break before chemo, I am rushing in my 2nd full shoulder joint replacement surgery which is currently pencilled in for December 18th Ho Ho Ho… I am currently practicing to open presents with one hand and my teeth as I’ll be in a sling for a wee while. I’m also going to get the Christmas lights up early also, God knows when they’ll come down though.
Lovely to be part of the group and apologies for the long pile of drivel above. I have a tendency to write quite a bit once I get going.
Thank you so much. The oils have been a wonderful discovery, as i never expected to see such a sudden change as I have with these. I simply tried my best to get something that may work for her and luckily, I seem to have hit the jackpot with this combination. Let me know if you need the names of the atomiser and the oil as they are on Amazon. I recall having one years ago that did very little for my airways, admittedly the trial came to an abrupt end as I somehow managed to get the power supply caught up with the washing and it went through the washer - End of the trial. Still have no idea how I managed that, although in my defence I was doing some decorating at the time and that's the best excuse i have 
