9736/21655
I currently have Schrodinger's Bloodstream (and he's not happy about it). Has the treatment I had in the summer worked and revitalised by white blood count and shrunk my spleen down to proper dimensions where it won't go pop? Or did the chemo fail to do its job and my racist hairy cells (it's OK, they're racist against whites, so that's not as bad) have been doing their best to keep my immune system from working? Not really in their interests as they go down with the ship if they kill me, but that didn't stop my hairy testicle. Watch out for the hairy things in your body. They hate you.
I am assuming it has probably worked, but I didn't really have any outside signs that anything was wrong earlier in the year and I haven't been feeling markedly different. I haven't had much communication from the NHS. My haematologist was meant to ring me after three months, but when I checked to see when that was happening I was told there was nothing in the diary, so have to wait another month to speak to her. I took a blood test a week or so ago, but again will have to wait for the results.
This probably indicates that I am at a low risk and that the treatment is always effective, but then again I assumed I was OK when I had my bone marrow tested and no one got in touch for a couple of months. It was only checked when my bollocks oncologist (he's good, that's just the area he specialised in) asked how it'd had gone and got them to look at the results and it was found to be leukaemia. So it's easy to fall between the cracks even with cancer.
Unsurprisingly I haven't been feeling brilliant since the chemo - that definitely took out my immune system and I am on antibiotics and anti-virals for six months in total. I've still picked up bugs and been feeling quite tired, but that's been the case since I was a parent. I have been doing a bit of exercise, but feeling very stiff afterwards and I've been eating lots of crap to get me through. Having lost a delightful six kilos in the fortnight after the chemo, I have put that and a bit more back on thanks to eating biscuits and sweets.
After my extreme Halloween sugar hangover I decided to get back on the healthy eating wagon one more time and in this last week I have been feeling a lot better. I played tennis a couple of times this week and it didn't wipe me out. I haven't been able to keep up with Park Run as our kids both have activities early Saturday mornings, but today I thought I'd try and run five kilometres on my own and see how that went.
So I ran two and a half kilometres from my house and back again. It was not fast (37 minutes) - Park Run does act as a pacer to be fair- but it was much more achievable than I expected and I didn't feel destroyed. In fact in the afternoon I went out and played Ernie at football in the park. No one else was there and we had the whole adult sized football pitch to ourselves and played one on one having to go at quite a pace up and down the field. He got tired of that quickly, but before I did and we then just did shooting practice. But I was pleased with how much energy I had and the lack of consequences.
Is that due to me not having had much sugar this week (I haven't even had a Solero guys, that's how serious this is) or due to my blood being closer to the way it's meant to be? My body feels fizzy rather than sluggish, so hopefully that's a good sign. Or fizzy blood might be the symptom of full body cancer. Who knows?
At some point, if the NHS remember, I do have to endure the discomfort of another bone marrow extraction. But that will at least let us know if everything has gone to plan. If so I get to repeat all this in about 2036 (if applicable) and then again in 2046 (I'm not putting that one in my diary).
