Blog 19 - Light

I must admit to forgetting how many people read this and how many people think about my journey.

I was sat at home last week feeling really sorry for myself when the phone rang and then an email came through and a text and the mobile phone rang and a facebook message popped up. Wow. No time to feel sorry for myself when so many of you are doing that for me. Thanks everyone.

But that didn’t take the pain away; it gave me just enough determination to get through the next couple of hours. That got me through the next two as well, and the next, and then overnight and a morning at Mount Vernon. Then the doctor explained properly about the pain relief strategy. So we’ve changed the plan and things are looking better and there’s light.

Gosh, my last blog was on 26^th October. Since then I’ve had my final week of treatment – brown week – and the two weeks of things getting worse – and they did – and now, after a few more days of no improvement, there is light. Yay!

I’d said a couple of weeks ago that I would investigate the role of the various painkillers – pity I didn’t follow that through. I’m now on 87mg of Fentanyl patches – up from 50mg last time I wrote. What this is doing is controlling the background pain; The pain of generally combating the chemotherapy and radiation effects. What the doctors call break-through pain is those periods when further painkillers are needed. To combat those occasions when the body is off doing something else and not fighting the main pain source. The first doctor suggested that this breakthrough pain dose should not be substantial – so I tried to keep it at 5mg. The second doctor, two weeks later, explained that the further painkiller also had to break-through the Fentanyl before it took effect, and so the minimum amount should be 15mg. Now that I’ve done that, I’m not in much pain – Yay! And crucially, my hallucinations aren’t too bad.

The second doctor also gave permission for me to use paracetamol for headaches. Headaches caused by the opiate based painkillers. So yay to that too!

Row and I have Yay’d so much we have
1) Booked 10 days in Spain in March
2) Booked 3 nights in Liverpool and 1 in Warwick for Christmas
3) Started the ball rolling on getting a new kitchen.

And in the next blog I’ll tell you what I intend to do to give back to Mount Vernon for the excellent treatment I’ve received.