Improvements...

It's been four weeks since I completed treatment. It's been a funny rollercoaster of emotions. You would think that it would be feelings of relief and elation that would follow the completion of the five months of intensive chemo and Radiotherapy treatment, but it was strange. Perhaps it was because I had been told that the Radiotherapy treatment would keep 'cooking' me for a good couple of week after the treatment has ended and that thing were going to get worse before they can get better or just the nagging thought that the next step in e proseses is waiting for the scan that will indicate how sucsessful (or not) the treatment has been. As I have stated in previous posts the first coupe of weeks following the treatment were pretty hellish. I was relived to discharged from the hospice and have the pain driver removed, but the biggest plus came yesterday when I went into Trelisk hospital to have a meeting with the speech and language therapist and to have my Hickman line removed. I was pretty nervous about the line's removal. I had a conversation with a jr doctor a few weeks ago about the proseses involved in its removal. He described it as 'having it dug out of you chest, as there is a small peg thats held in place by tissue in you chest that will have grown around it while it's been fitted, this has to be cut free'. His graphic description did nothing for my confidence! The meeting with the speech therapist was very positive. She conducted a swallow test to see if I can swallow water and then food safely without ingesting any of it into my lungs. The test began with taking sips of water and works up through set yohgurt and then mashed banana. I managed all three with ease and she seemed really happy with how things were going. She told my that it's usually two months before people are able to eat the yoghurt, so on be on the banana after just one month was really good going. I asked what kind of foods I should be trying to eat, if at all. She said that a diet of sort food such as porridge, custard and over cooked pasta. This probably sound very unapealing to you, but after almost ten weeks without any solid food to me it sounded amazing. The procedure to remove the Hickman line wasn't as bad as I had imagined, in fast it was painless. The local anesthetic was so powerful I counldnt feel a thing. I came away with four stitches and a small dressing feeling amazing! I was another artifact of my illness gone, another step closer to normality... It felt very good indeed!