Chemo Day 4 (+1)

Days 1-3 of chemo went without issue with shortish days on Monday and Tuesday. I felt pretty good each day - walked home from the hospital and spent the evenings watching the football and eating well. They give you so many IV steroids and anti sickness drugs that you mostly feel fine during week 1. Wednesday and Thursday were longer days - about 6 hours of IV with all the additional fluids they give you, so I stayed overnight as an inpatient for ease.

On Thursday I was a lot more lethargic and had a very full feeling in my whole body, which I put down to having 4 days if chemo and an insane amount of pills and fluids. When I was about to be discharged I mentioned my breathing was a bit more laboured and they decided to do a CT scan to check for blood clots. They found some fluid around my lungs which was 'unexpected' and decided to keep me in overnight to monitor it. Today my breathing seems better and I've just had a xray so currently waiting for the result to see the updated fluid situation.

The blood test this morning showed my potassium is low so they will put me on a drip to raise this up. I am likely to be here for most of the day and possibly overnight until they have got this to the right level.

Saying all this, I generally feel pretty good! A bit tired but stomach feels fine etc. These issues all seem manageable and I'm glad I'm in hospital rather than being sent home and having to be rushed back in.

Thanks to everyone who has been here with me in the hospital or come to visit, it's made it all pretty fun and easy so far.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog Post - The Switch and Call to Arms!

Image
  Blog Post - The Switch and Call to Arms! Long but important post, I would appreciate if you gave it a full read. Me and my amazing sister enjoying the sun The first few weeks of lockdown I was floating nicely through the time by staying busy and upbeat. It was easy, idyllic and probably not too different from anyone elses unless they are on a mission to teach themselves Mandarin or in the habit of cracking open a beer at 1pm. In many ways you can’t beat the pure liberation of being able to wake up when you want, having few plans set in stone and being able to do whatever you want with the time you have. Over the last couple of months, though, my energy had dropped and I had started doing less. It might have been due to boredom, situational fatigue or being stuck in my head more than is healthy. However, it was undeniable that my physical symptoms were no longer slowly creeping up on me. I look drastically different and have lost a lot of weight. A lot. A 20 minute aggressive coughing
Read more

Accepting Terminal Illness

How do you truly accept that you are going to die? When I was first given the diagnosis, in what feels like the start of a second life, I found it almost impossible to concentrate on anything other than cancer and death. It felt like I was having an existential crisis. I was getting by minute by minute, hour by hour, and my mind felt like it was melting as I tried to contemplate the unfathomable. The bleak statistics were constantly going around my head. Less than 10% of people in my position live more than 5 years. The most (and only really proven) effective treatment has about a 30% chance of being effective at keeping the disease stable. Even with it, median life span is about 18 months. With everything else going on - a constant stream of hospital appointments, telling people what was happening, and dealing with the fallout in other parts of my life - it was a lot to get my head around. But I was treating it like a death sentence, and started reading what I could about termina
Read more

Coughing my way through Covid

Image
Back in the motherland I’ve had a cough for around six months now. It was fairly innocuous - the kind of cough most people have in the UK in the winter. A few times it’s been a bit more than that; whilst I was in America in February I had a couple of days of pretty bad coughing fits, but thankfully they resolved themselves. Over time, though, the cough has got progressively worse. It is more consistent now and the fits have become more regular. My breathing has also become slightly more laboured. Occasionally there is a wheeze on the in breath. When I’m walking and have a brief spurt of heavy coughing, I feel eyes on me accusing me of not locking myself away. I would love for this to be a mild case of Covid (so long as it doesn’t get any worse of course), but I'm accepting that I am no longer asymptomatic.  I’ve said previously that the disconnect between feeling fine whilst getting very negative scan results was something I was struggling with a lot, as it made my situa
Read more