Well the last couple of weeks have not been fun.
Two weekends ago, I was planning a fun bike ride near Thames, but instead I ended up back in hospital for the weekend. After everything that has happened over the last 17-18 months, every ache, pain or weird thing that my body experiences or produces causes fear to raise its ugly head.
For the last 6 months roughly, at least a couple of times a week I get major stomach pains. They feel as if I am being sawn in half. Thankfully they usually only ever last at the most 2 to 3 hours. I think that the pain is caused by something I have eaten or possibly not eaten. So I have to endeavour to be far more strict on the medication I need to help digest food, then with luck, these pains wont happened so often or as severely.
But 2 weeks ago, they hit with vengeance and after a whole night of them and no sign of them easing up by the morning, it was off to the hospital … again…
The staff I have to say were great. One look at my file and everything moved at a fast pace and I was rushed off for a CT scan. I am pleased to say, that they couldn’t find anything to cause the pain….. BUT…
What they did find was nodules at the operation site and nodules in my lungs. Actually I think once they saw these they forgot about the pain that brought me in there, and with the help of the morphine, I must admit I was not too concerned about it either. In fact with the pain numbed all I wanted to do was go home.
Tuesday afternoon I am back with the Oncologist. With great relief he tells me the nodules at the operation site are nothing to worry about…. But he was concerned at what seemed a blockage in the bowel, could be the cancer back. He also spent quite a bit of time discussing the nodules in the lungs, unsure if they also were the cancer returned.
So I was booked for a colonoscopy and a gastroscopy on Friday and he was taking my case to the Specialists Group meeting the following morning to discuss the nodules in the lungs in particular.
To say I have been walking round with my head in a grey cloud would really be an understatement. I am sure that I must have been so hard to live with over the last week. Walking out of his office, wondering if I have this fight on my hands again, and the need to muster up up all the positivity I can, again, just felt too hard. All I could think of on the way home, was the Oncologists words from July last year….”if it comes back within a year, there wont be anything we can do”.
So here I am a week later, the colonoscopy and gastroscopy were last week and they were absolutely fine. Not a problem to be found. Well at least one part of me is healthy…
But the lungs are another issue. The medical team are still unsure if the nodules are cancer. They want to wait a couple of months to see if they grow. If they do then, it is the cancer back. The Oncologist, is great. He doesn’t sugar coat anything and his honesty is refreshing through sometimes hard to hear. So I end with his final words for me this week – “lets wait and see”.