I've had a realisation that tonight, right now, is the most unhappy I have ever been in my life. I am in hospital, I have significant amounts of drugs circulating my body, I am neutropenic. I have terrible back pain caused by one of the drugs I am being given to stimulate my bone marrow. I can't sleep. I'm having night sweats and nightmares. I am just waiting for the morphine to kick in and hopefully knock me out. I've got another 5 months of chemotherapy to go. I'm about to start losing my hair. It is Friday 13th December 2024.
Just 4 months ago I was happy. Newly married, settled into country life in Norfolk. Fit and healthy having lost 3 stones of weight. Making new friends and nurturing old friendships. Then wham. A cancer diagnosis out of nowhere like a bomb going off under my feet.
Here are the drugs I have taken in the last 10 days:
epirubicin and cyclophosphamide (chemotherapy)
dexamethasone (steriod)
ondansetron (anti-nausea)
Omeprazole (to help my digestive system)
Filgrastim (to stimulate production of neutrophils)
Goserelin (Zoladex)
Zoledronic Acid (bone strengthener)
Co-Amoxiclav (antibiotic)
Morphine
For someone who took nothing prior to all this happening, bar a paracetamol occasionally, this list feels shockingly big. Add to that multiple cannulas and blood tests.
My body feels utterly violated.
I am being slowly poisoned by the chemo. From the day of that first infusion, I could feel it inside me. My skin started to feel strange, my scalp was tender. My mouth felt odd. It wasn't fast and sudden, no terrible sickness or reaction. But just a long, slow poisoning that will continue for the next 5 months. The day of chemo I felt fine, relaxed really. But now, thinking about having to go back on Christmas Eve for my second dose and watching the bright red drug be pushed into my veins fills me with slight horror.
After chemo you are sent home with a big bag of drugs to take for the following days to help manage the side effects. The worst of these is Filgrastim as it involves self-injecting into the stomach, never a pleasant experience.
A week after the chemo I was back in for my first hormone treatment - Zoladex. This is a fairly nasty injection of a sort of slow-release pellet into the subcutaneous tissue in the stomach. A friend described the needle as a 'capri-sun straw'. She wasn't wrong. The Zoladex works to suppress the ovaries and stop my body producing oestrogen, bringing on menopausal symptoms. Hence the night sweats and hot flushing, skin flare ups and all the other joys that may come with that. I am 47 so menopause was probably around the corner for me, but I wanted it to be a natural process, for my body to move into its next phase of life when it was ready. Not to be forced into it with urgency and immediacy.
The day after Zoladex and Zoladronic Acid (an infusion to help strengthen the bones due to the Zoladex raising chances of osteoporosis), my temperature spiked. I had to come back in to hospital for urgent blood tests. These showed that my white blood cells (neutrophils) had plummeted to a dangerously low level leaving me at high risk of neutropenic sepsis as I would not be able to fight even the natural bacteria that sits in our bodies. So I have been put on IV antibiotics and fluids, additional injections of filgrastim to boost the neutrophils and shut away in a sterile room to recover. I thought I had tolerated chemo 1 pretty well all things considered but it turns out the dose was simply too high for my body to take, so that is now being reduced by 20% for the next lot.
And here I now am, wallowing in my own misery and marvelling at just how quickly my life has changed. My longest hospital stay since I gave birth to my beautiful daughter nearly 16 years ago, and not the return to work after chemo I had hoped for!
Today it feels difficult to find a positive to end on. But I can say this much - I have met people who are experiencing so much worse than me. Younger women facing the potential of life without being able to have children. Of double mastectomies and hysterectomies and weekly chemo sessions. There are people who need cancer treatment and can't have it because their bodies are not strong enough to cope. So really I am lucky to be where I am and one day I will make my peace with that. For now I will hold on to the fact the staff at the hospital have been as amazing as ever, I am being so well looked after. And I get my own room! So it is sort of like being in a hotel but one where you get asked about your bowel movements whilst eating your lasagne.
Lizzie Wright
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