All a blur...

The title of this entry kind of describes the last few weeks. Since my last entry I've spent a week in hospital and since then have been let out with a strick regime of medication and I'm now feeding 100% through the feeding tube in my stomach.

Since that last post where the symptoms of the RT treatment had begun to kick in I had a meeting the oncologist and some of the other members of my care team at Trelisk and they insisted that I needed to come back in so that pain and food and fluids can be put under control.

I was placed back up on Wheal Coats ward, which is the ward I was very first admitted on the last November following my diagnosis. It really brought home to me how long it's been and how much had happened in that time. It was quite quite as the six bed room had patients ranging from gaul bladder removal to nerve damage from a nasty accident opening a can of tuna fish! and they al seemed quite happy to keep themselves to themselves. For once it was me with the anti social behaviour. I was being sick about every half hour, but not just any old sickness where you do it and its gone. This was the never ending dry wretching kind that seemed to produce an unsatisfing amount of bile with a very worrying ammount of blood. I mentioned the large ammount of blood to the doctors and they seemed to shrug it of apart of the symptoms of the treatment. Ok I'll go with that for now, I thought to myself.

The doctors requested that I be put on a syringe driver. This is a syringe full of a cocktail of pain and sickness relief that the driver will administer over a 12hr period. Great, I thought unil the cumbersome transparent box arrived that was to be connected to my stomach via a large flexible needle. The beauty of the driver is that it puts the drugs I need straight ino my blood stream, so here's mo way I can sick them back up, as I was doing before.

With the driver in place the differen was noticeable within a few hours. The urge to be sick had been cut right back and the pain in my throat, mouth, and jaw had become dulled.

Now to approach the fact that I was unable to eat through being sick so often, bu also the loss of movement in my jaw and the loss of my swallowing reflex ment eating had been reduced to small sips of water at best. They decided that a crsh diet using feeding tube had to be put ino place. This would mean a 1000ml bag of gloopy food replacement be given through my stomach tube over a period of 10 hrs. They recommend at this is done during he night, I tried this but it made me really sick. I've found it much easier on my stomach to feed during the day, but this involves these of a small pack pack that the food and pump fit inside. It all looks a bit kooky , but a least I can go and sit in the sun or watch the kids play in the garden instead of being locked down to a pump system set up in the back bedroom.

I thunk the biggest thought I've had on my mind of late is how close we are to the end of the treatment. I've got chemo on Monday which will take a week to get over and then I'm looking at only two more weeks of Rt and I'm done! I feeling pretty dragged down by the relentlessness of the travelling too and from hospital every day and the massive amount of drugs I'm on as well as the feeding through the stomach and the pretty hideous side effects from the RT itself. This aside it's been amazing to have some nice spring days this last week. It's like it's saying "not long now mate, soon be summer, soon be free"