Here We Go Again

It's Sunday, it's lunchtime and in 20 minutes or so we should be heading off to friends for lunch. Hardly the best time to start writing here. But I have to make a start of sorts as there's a lot to plough through and I can't put it off any more.

This blog was meant to be a thing of hope and optimism. The fact that there have been few recent entries is a reflection of how, after such a comfortable start, things have begun to get more oppressive and unpleasant. These are not feelings and attitudes I want to share with friends and family and so I've kept them, largely, to myself. However, I also feel compelled by some personal need to catalogue all the ups and downs and many of you are aware that I've got more surgery coming up and you've expressed a wish to be kept informed. Again I think it's the anaesthesia approach. The more familiar I am with what they are doing the less fearful I am. If I know the worst and feel I can cope with it then I have little to fear. Hence my new motto - "Prepare for the worst but hope for the best". So what comes next may seem to be depressing reading. If so I'm sorry. I'm not depressed, I'm keeping busy and enjoying as much as I can but I can see that I could be facing a bit of a struggle from now on - let's hope only in the shorter term.

I try to avoid thinking about what the worst really means. As a consequence I am now suffering the after effects of last summers trauma. I was told that my nerves would take about a year to recover physically (not emotionally). I'm beginning to discover what this means. The stiffness and tighness is now joined by tingling, aching, wincing moments of shooting pains, numbness and tenderness, toothache in absent teeth, a pull on my lip as though I've been caught on a fish hook and a swollen feel in my cheek which makes me think that I didn't just dream about Mike Tyson. If you've read the previous instalments you will know that up until early June everything seemed hunky dory. I felt as though I was making a good recovery, that the cancer had gone and that I would be left with a number of problems but nothing too serious. It looked as though I had beaten the beast and could get on with retirement. It was not to be so simple and I look at myself now as a bit naive and simple for thinking it would all be so easy.

You probably know that I have partly lost my voice. After three scans and two physical examinations the butchers have finally decided that this is due to a cancer in my thyroid gland. If so, this is likely to be a completely new cancer, unconnected with the one I had last year. There are a few points that support this diagnosis, the main one being that there are no other signs of cancer anywhere on the scan, another being that this is exactly what the scan shows. Had it been a secondary from the tumour I had last summer the docs would have expected to see a number of 'hot-spots' in different parts of my body. As it is, there is only one which the scan shows as being in my thyroid. In some ways this is a hopeful development; not as hopeful as there being no cancer at all but, I'm told, thyroid cancer is fairly easy to deal with a good chance of a successful outcome. If I had to have anything, this is one of the better cancers to have. The other side of this diagnosis is that eight months or so is about when the docs would expect to find signs of secondary cancers. It appears to have developed in the only place that wasn't blasted by the Dalek - the line down the front of my throat which was protected to prevent my spinal chord from being zapped. I also don't know whether a thyroid cancer would explain my voice loss. It has been interesting comparing the approach of the two consultants on my case. One is far more strongly guided by the technology, feeling that if the scan shows it in my thyroid then that's where it is with all the positives that that includes. The other is more intuitive and wonders whether the scan might be misleading. If he is right then his concerns are based on a more unpleasant scenario with more traumatic outcomes.

So this Friday I have to another op. This time they will remove my thyroid so the pathologists can examine it in detail. If they find a cancer inside, surrounded by healthy tissue they will feel they have removed it all. If there is any indication that it has broken out I then have to go and have a dose of radio-active iodine. This seeks out wayward thyroid cells, attaches to them and wipes them out. It also means that I remain radio-active for a few days or so and therefore have to be kept in isolation until I am safe to approach again! Thereafter I have a life of pills to look forward to but I'm beginning to discover that there is a nation of thyroxin takers out there, so I won't be alone.
A worse outcome will be if they find the 'hot-spot' is not a thyroid cancer after all but a secondary from last year's tumour. Good news will be that it's only in my throat and, apparently, nowhere else. Bad news is that removing it could be difficult and the consequences ... well I'm not going into that yet, we'll wait and see.

So, for the last three months I've been living life in slow motion. The response times within the NHS are ponderous to say the least. Wait two weeks for a scan, wait another two weeks for the result, wait another two weeks for another scan and another two weeks for the results of that ... as was pointed out to me, there has been a remarkable lack of urgency. In the meantime it looks very much as though our planned trip to Canada and California this October will have to be forfeit, I can't see that I'll have recovered from the surgery and the cancer sufficiently to take the risk - getting insurance is going to be prohibitively expensive. In some ways that is a bigger regret than having to undergo more surgery. It has also put life into a kind of suspention. It has been hard to plan or even to look forward knowing that behind this is a possibility of more hospitalisation, more surgery and more time spent dealing with the cancer than getting out and doing things.

So - I'm going to leave it there, if you got this far thanks for taking so much interest. By the time you read this my op may well be over and I may even be composing the next entry telling you what the docs found. I go in later on today, there's a bit of me that can't wait. If I've got this thing inside me I'll be only too pleased to get rid of it. By this time tomorrow it should all be over, with luck forever - fingers crossed!