Hi everyone,
I want to open this blog by saying that I hope that you’re all getting along okay. No doubt you’re all stir crazy like me, but be strong. I really do hope that you’re all keeping to lockdown, socially distancing yourselves and doing everything in your power to help beat this bastard.
Kerry, Rupert and I are all doing okay at the moment. Well… we’re not but we’re doing our best, but I’ll break them all down separately:-
Kerry: Okay, so she FINALLY took delivery of her gym equipment. An Olympic Bar, two dumbbells, a kettlebell and enough plates (weight) to tide us over until Covid-19 blows over and who knows. Until we have our own home gym.
She has said that other than climbing, dog walks and the gym, her day to day isn’t affected to much by this. Kerry has always worked from home and let’s face it, she was always a bit socially distant! (Her own words)
She says she is okay, although I will be the one driving her up the wall. (married rights) However to compensate, I have been cooking 95% of her meals which always makes her happy. I suppose being on lockdown with a chef has its perks. There will be the odd cereal bowl, ramen or pasta she makes herself but I have always enjoyed cooking for her.
Lockdown hasn’t changed our eating habits much, we haven’t drastically changed our diets I mean, however I am reading out there. It has changed a lot for some people. They can’t get their convenience food they’re used to. We don’t really at much of that. We have managed to get the foods we eat via delivery or we have managed to go out and get them from the supermarket.
I think we are a lot more conscious that X food needs to be used by Y date because of C-19. You can’t catch everything, some spinach and some bread items went in the bin but other than that, we didn’t and don’t buy in bulk and then let it spoil which I am say, breaks my heart to see on the news.
I have enjoyed batch cooking and then freezing portions for lazy days when you can’t be arsed to be the domestic god.
Oh I enjoyed a beer the other night, I had planned on getting hammered, I bought like 4 IPA’s and two large Corona beers. Enough for little me to get drunk. Yeah… took me 3 days to drink it all. Ha!
Oh well…
Kerry said, the money we are saving by not leaving the house is just crazy. The meal out here and there, shopping trips for crap we probably didn’t really need, it all adds up.
Kerry made a joke that we should book our next Japan trip. I mean… Yeah we should! However until I am back at work and earning 100% of my wages again… well you know what I am saying.
Rupert: Okay, so poor little fella has been suffering a skin condition for 4-5 months now. We’ve been to the vet, he’s had an anti mite/tick/flea treatment, we have adjusted his diet dramatically, he’s getting regular baths, like one every other day.
We haven’t had a hotspot in well over a couple of weeks now.
We are really on top of him scratching. His hair is starting to grow back in the places he licked/chewed himself raw on. He still looks like he is suffering alopecia a little but it’s starting to grow back. He seems to actually scratch a lot less, even though we stop him when he tries. It’s not the constant 24/7 it felt like it had become some months ago. We also have him on antihistamines too. Human ones, and I feel like one of the above treatments is helping him. So I am super pleased with that. I felt like his scratching had become habitual but I’m most probably clutching to be honest.
He’s getting his daily walks most days. We know that we can travel short distances for a walk and we are going to do that occasionally, but for the most part we walk him at Saltwell Park and there’s 22 hectares of fun there for him.
Anyways, he says hello and he is still your best friend.
Me: Well, as you all may know, my treatment is on pause at the moment.
If you don’t, I have just completed a 28 day course of Radiochemotherapy concentrating on my main tumour in my bowel. Although I am glad that the hell on earth treatment has completed. I am now paused until C-19 blows over.
I am okay I guess. I am checking in on my fellow bloggers. Some of them still going to hospital daily/weekly for treatment. Chemotherapy, radiotherapy. I can’t say I would be happy having to travel and receive treatment daily. That sounds to me like a great way to catch Coronavirus.
Anyways, Bowel Warrior was told by her team, radiotherapy wasn’t on the cards anymore but then they went back on it and gave her the therapy anyway. I’m made up for her. She could do with a break.
Especially knowing that loads of us are ready for our curative (Yes I know you can’t cure it) operations and simply leaving us with our cancers to fester is well… frankly just terrifying. I am stage IV and I don’t what it spreading further than it has already. If you don’t know that’s my lungs and one of my seminal vesicles.
What I can say is that I am all healed up from the last treatment for now. I can use my bowels like normal for once which is amazing news for me.
I am stir crazy, unlike Kerry. I do tend to as I describe, ‘Thrive’ on human interaction and I miss my workmates and besties (as I know Kerry does too) and I guess not having a garden to sit in when the sun is blaring outside sucks too.
So, I know some of you won’t agree with this and please try to see it from my point of view.
I have been going out on the dog walk. In the car on shopping trips too.
I do need some vitamin D too, I am super sick of the four walls of our home and Rupert and Kerry need exercise too.
I am however, being super careful. I don’t touch anything. Hands in my pockets the whole time. Gloves if I did need to touch anything. I give people double the distance you should all be giving each other. I cross sides of the path, walk off the path, anything I can do. I will say, some people are good about it but I find that joggers are just the worst. I get it… You’re out for a run, you’ve got your music blaring, but you run way too close to other people, you’re exhaling big clouds of your breath and some of them spitting on the ground.
I am fully aware I am generalising right now. I still see people congregating in the park. Bunch of teenagers playing 5 a side in the tennis courts. Sunbathers on the fields. Some kids all sharing a joint together. I mean, that’s just trying to catch C-19 if you ask me.
Well, painwise, I just don’t have any pain for now which is class, or it was until…
ARE YOU H*CKING KIDDING ME?!?!?
A kidney stone. So cancer wasn’t enough was it body was it? Noooooo! About a week 10 days ago, I had a kidney stone. I woke up in the middle of the night with the all too familiar agony in my back.
I should say that I have had a total of 4 kidney stones in my life. 2 of them within a year of each other about 6 years ago. Another a couple of years ago and now 1 more.
I don’t know if it’s something in the water in this house. I know I don’t eat the foods that are known for creating them. I could just be one of those unlucky people that create them.
I don’t know if it was my body going. Oh heeeeeey, I know you’re not in pain right now so ‘Have some of this’
The good news is I have all the Tramadol and Oramorph to float HMS Queen Elizabeth on.
The initial pain is the worst, it’s a zero to 10/10 pain completely out of nowhere. However, this time I got a bit of a bladder infection for my troubles too. I understand that they come part and parcel with kidney stones but I wasn’t sure it was just the feeling of when the kidney stone drops into your bladder. (if you don’t know, when it drops into your bladder you get a constant urge to pee and kinda hurts each time you do pee)
If you’re super lucky, you can just pee it out. I guess I did this time but was left with that constant urge to go and pain right at the end of the pee.
Most people don’t realise, we all get them, yeah, you’re not immune. I guess it’s the bigger ones that cause issues. The ones that get trapped I mean.
So I did call my GP surgery and spoke to a close Doctor friend too. They both agreed that antibiotics would be the best course of action, but I stopped getting the pain a day after speaking to both of them so cancelled any prescription from being delivered. No point in taking antibiotics unless you need them. I think the NHS could do with all of the stocks they have. Made sense to me.
You’d think I would have been super pissed about it all you know, getting a kidney stone I mean… While I will admit I just didn’t have the energy to be angry about it. Yeah, it did feel like, just what else could go wrong, I used the painkillers at the right times and I just weathered the storm. I will add that I can’t have been as big as any of the ones I have had before, but just bloody codshit you know? I could have done without that happening.
I think Kerry just rolled her eyes and helped in anyway she could.
So apologies for the lack of updates. I thank everyone that replied to the blog or reached out to me via social media, texts and emails about my well being. I hadn’t blogged because I really didn’t have an update to give.
I do now realise that for the most part, most people think of the blog as a way for me to update everyone on me, not just the cancer journey and wanted the blog anyways. I will go back to one a week again if that is the case.
I can’t say there will be a lot of content. I will even update it to say all is well.
So stay safe, wash yo’ hands and keep busy.
Love
Cam
An honest blog about a guy's journey through cancer and chemotherapy 