After a few months of deliberation, I have decided to join the group, write about my own experiences and take advice from and offer support to others. This is a clearly wonderful and supportive community and browsing the posts has helped me enormously.
I have been living away from the UK for over six years - in Vietnam for four years, where i met my wonderful wife, and in the UAE for just over two years. I am 37 years old and found out that I had bowel (rectal) cancer a day before I was officially diagnosed in April of this year, here in Abu Dhabi. The colorectal surgeon I was referred to following a sigmoidoscopy (the colonoscopy was impossible because of the mass) broke the news very gently over the course of two appointments until he had the official confirmation. As soon as he uttered the question: Do you have children? I knew. I had been having problems with severe constipation and the occasional bout of diarrhoea for many months but had attributed it to stress at work, irregular eating times and habits and a plethora of other things. In fact, i do wonder if the symptoms have persisted for years... The GI doctor I was initially registered with was sure I had celiac disease, then ulcerative colitis, until they were ruled out.
Once diagnosed, the ball rolled quickly. I am very lucky in that I am a teacher with very good free (up to a point!) medical insurance. Within three weeks of diagnosis, I began my chemoradiotherapy, which I have recently found out did not have the desired effect: no wonder I tolerated the treatment well!
On September 8th I underwent surgery: anterior resection and loop ileostomy. Even though the surgery was a success in that the tumour was fully removed, my post-operative staging has not changed: eight out of 12 lymph nodes were tested positive with a staging of 3c : t3N2b. I have just begun a six-month course of chemo: I had my first IV chemotherapy dosage on Saturday and the oral form (Xeloda - which I have had before) will be approved by the insurance over the next couple of days. The last couple of days have been a bit more difficult because of the IV chemotherapy. Aside from that, my only major complaint after the first couple of days of recovering from surgery has been the skin problems and irritation around the stoma. If this persists, perhaps I can ask somebody with experience for some advice.
Even though I have been 'blissfully naive' about much of this journey so far, my mindset has been helped enormously by my philosophy of life. My wife and I have remained positive throughout so far, and in a perverse way, it has helped us being away from family and friends. It has allowed us to think of the worry they are going through and to worry about them rather than ourselves. My parents came out a week before surgery and will go back the UK tomorrow. We leave next Monday and I am very much looking forward to taking in the clean, green air of my native Welsh countryside and seaside.
My wife and I do face two dilemmas, which often takes our minds off the cancer: we were leaving Abu Dhabi anyway, but the diagnosis and treatment has meant that I don't have a job to go home to. Being a teacher, however, I will be able to do supply work, but the dreams of further promotion are halted at the moment. Secondly, my wife is Vietnamese and the Vietnamese passport is weak. Unless you have 60,000GBP in the bank or earn a salary (which I don't have at the moment) we cannot apply for the spouse visa. She has a six-month visitor visa, and during the next six months, we will explore other options to ensure that she can stay with me in the UK throughout my treatment - I am sure there must be exceptional circumstances that advisors can help us take advantage of.
Even though this 'journey' is a challenge, I have been able to disseminate far more positives than negatives. The outpouring of love and support I have received from family and particularly friends has been nothing short of remarkable. I understand that some people don't necessarily have such a network and if I can be of any help to anyone, I would love to support them.
This has been a rather longer post than I expected to write, so if you made it to the end: you deserve a medal.
All my very best wishes to everyone who is also on this journey or knows someone who is.
Mathew
Hi Mathew
Welcome to the online community.
I did manage to read through to the end and finish your post and was very sorry to hear of the pitfalls you have experienced, no one wants to join our club and many, like you, spend a lot of time reading posts before they take the plunge and introduce themselves to us.
There are just a couple of things I would like to address initially, the first being the question of your wife and her passport issues, in this respect you could seek advice from in our Ask an Information and Support Adviser page, it might be that easiest way to do this is just to cut and paste the above page into the advisers page and find out if they any suggestions for you.
The second point is probably the one we can find a solution to very quickly and that is the irritation you have around your stoma, if you can tell me a bit more of what you are experiencing and the type of irritation I'm sure that we can find a solution. Would it be possible for your to join me over in our Ileostomy, colostomy, urostomy and any other stoma support group. It would be helpful to know if it's just an itch, you have broken skin, when it occurs and the type of stoma you have and we can work on a solution but I do think that it will easy to solve the problem for you.
By typing in my username @The BODACH and when you see the blue box appear
Click on it and this will send me a message that you have asked me a question as my username will be green as this in the message and we can get ti work.
I hope you have a pleasant journey back to the UK and Wales and the remainder of your treatment goes well.
Please do contact the information and support advisers and join me in the stoma support group where I hope to hear from you soon.
Ian
