It's been four weeks since my last chemo. Treatment held up due to the Easter holiday. These weeks have been a break from all things chemical which on the one hand has been wonderful. Side effects have had more time to wear off, hair has grown back...no it hasn't who am I kidding? Life has returned more to normal, well a weird kind of normal with less visits to hospital, less pills to take.
This would all be more or less true if I hadn't had this new invasion of pain into my hip, my good hip, my new shiny titanium hip. I mentioned it in my last blog, then I thought it was sure to be a running injury, a strain from the daily runs I had been doing. I'm not so sure now. It doesn't feel like that sort of pain to me. This is me, the person who I guess is bound to feel a little paranoid. The doctors are fairly sure it's not new disease, they say that it's more likely to be the result of injured bone healing and being weak. So I should go with that but they are doing another MRI scan just in case, just to take a closer look.
That will make me feel better, although not being able to run or walk without a limp does really piss me off. It's crazy how much more I feel like I have cancer now. Now I'm limping, now I heave a sigh if I get up or sit down, now I walk slowly and with a slight grimace. (Not to mention the virtually total loss of my eyebrows, so much worse than my head hair!) This is how a person with cancer should behave surely? Like they are ill, hairless and ill....?
No! No! No! This is not how I want to be, I want to be strong, I want to do 10 or 20 or 50 press- ups if I feel like it, I want to swim and run and go to work. (I did have a sneaky dip in the sea the other day, a joyous half hour with friends which felt truly wonderful; weightless on my hip and icy cold on my bald head! Alive!!)So tomorrow I get more drugs, more CHOP coursing through my veins. It's a weird feeling, on the one hand I'm so not looking forward to the inevitable side effects: Feeling nauseous, getting mouth ulcers, having a horrible taste and texture in my mouth blah...blah ...blah. But with it I am hoping the steroids will kick the pain into touch, that the chemo will continue to shrink the tumours and that I will perversely feel better again, more able to rejoin the human race and do stuff again without that newly familiar groan and grunt.
So that's how things are here on the health front, or the not so healthy front. Meanwhile spring is slowly slipping in over the moor. The birds know it (well most of them!), the flowers know it, the tadpoles know it, the bluebells and the primroses know it, even the trees are beginning to know it with an ever so tentative green fuzz on the tips of their branches. (Here on the high moor we are several weeks behind the rest of you with regards the awakening of the land from the deep sleep of winter.) But I am still waiting for the first cuckoo to sing its ominously sweet song. The cuckoos here on Exmoor are wonderful, they sing and call and tease you into thinking you can see them when really only they can see you. Rachel and I spend hours following their song and watching patiently with binoculars waiting for an elusive glimpse of the beautiful nest thief. Singing from one side of the valley and then the next, now you see me now you don't. However this year we still haven't heard a single cuckoo in the Barle valley. It is full of the sweet sounds of birds but not the cuckoo.What if they don't come back this year?
I'm not running but Rachel and Di are, training for the Great North Run...thanks again for all your support. Here is a link to their Just Giving Page....just in case.
https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/run-or-die
Love the swimming pic! xx
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