The Cortisol Diaries

Quick scan update from about an hour ago. It showed progressive disease. The tumours have grown between 30-50% since November, the largest being about 10x6cm (previously 7x4cm) in the surgical bed. There are new tumours in both the lungs and lympth nodes but nothing new anywhere else in the body and nothing likely to be causing me any physical problems at the moment other than general disease burden e.g. tiredness. Disappointing, but it was never that likely this chemo would do much so I'm not surprised. My mitotane is dropping but still not close enough for getting on the trial in Germany any time soon. The next plan is to see about clinical trials, speak to the US team about radical surgery, and get a second opinion from a team in Birmingham who are a bit more specialised. It may be because I have only just had the result, but I feel fine. My mood has leveled out recently and im seeing every day as a bonus. I'm looking forward to not being on chemo and being free from ana...

Last summer, when the scan showed the treatment wasn’t working, I felt like I needed a break from it all. As well as any treatment, I also decided to stop with the sleeping pill (temazepam) and antidepressant (sertraline) that I had been taking since I was diagnosed. I no longer needed the sleeping pill and wasn’t sure that I had ever needed the anti-depressant. The internet warned me this would be hard. Many websites said coming off temazepam was seen as harder than coming off heroin and that it often requires rehab, or at the very least having close supervision by a doctor. Always one to overestimate myself and not one to back away from a challenge, I figured it couldn’t possibly be that hard and started tapering off both, very slowly, without medical help from early September until late December. It will be impossible to articulate the last four months of emotions and put them in to one blog post so consider this a very long snippet. To say that it hit me like a truck doesn’t ...