I didn’t get to see my usual doctor. The hospital was very busy and at breaking point. The three hour delay rolled into an four hour delay. Each extension of the wait added more stress to the faces of the staff. I love the NHS for obvious reasons, and I know I am biased, but If the NHS had more money, and had a workforce like it has, it would be unstoppable.
It should of been just a normal assessment at the hospital to see if I was healthy enough to have chemotherapy in two days time. But due to getting pain in my chest, the doctor said he was going to chase up the scan results from two days ago and will call me back in to his office when he had the results.
I did my usual pacing up and down the corridor. The doctor called me back in and told me my tumour count has gone up and looking at the scan it’s looks like The cancer is back in the liver and maybe it is now in the lungs – and because of that there is no point of going back on chemo, and sorry to say, that there is nothing else we can do.
I sat in silence.
The doctor also sat in silence waiting for me to stand up and go.
I, yet again, found my self in a world full of uncertainty and it as not been easy for all of us involved.
I left the doctors surgery, dazed and confused state. I went to see the nurses in the chemotherapy ward, and not for the first time, they wiped away the tears, made me a cup of tea and gave me a verbal kicking up my backside, i needed to pull myself together to then deal with this. I can’t just accept that, this is it! So we arranged a meeting with my oncologist for the following week.
Desperately looking what to do I searched the internet. The advice I found via google for people in my situation all seemed to have a depressive tone of voice. I don’t expect advice about having terminal cancer to be laugh a minute. But if I read an article or a book about living with cancer, or living with a terminal disease, or, to put it bluntly, living with dying, – I want it more about the living part! I don’t plan to be reading it when dead!
With now one out of two people getting cancer in their lives, it’s now not just down to lifestyle or luck, it’s getting to the point of probability. More people are surviving cancer and with new research, if they can’t cure it, we are finding more ways to live longer with cancer, but it seems that there is very little information out there about this, and also how to cope with it. I have had to find my own coping mechanisms for this in the past few years which I have wrote about.
The meeting with my doctor went ok, they feel that I would be a good candidate for a couple of different trials, one in Newcastle and the other in Cambridge. Professor Leen in London that does the ablation said, after reviewing the scan the shape is very unusual on the liver, and he as not seen anthing like it.
We also saw a doctor in Harrogate to get his point of view, he also thinks the trails would be a good direction.
Right now, we are traveling down to London. I have a meeting with one of the main doctors on Harley Street that deals with Pancreatic cancer to see if there are any other options.
So, I guess I have two choices, I can accept my current situation, or not, there is no right or wrong answers here, both choices involve a certain amount of bravery. For me, right now I can’t accept that there is nothing we can do.
I am looking into gene therapy, I believe they make chemo from my own DNA, there as been really promising results with other cancers.
I accept that the future will get harder and, with that knowledge I trust that every step forward, can be made easer from the lesions of the previous step.
We are now traveling back from London. The meeting with the professor was great, he said that this is an unusual case and because of that we should treat it differently.
I am going back down to London next week for a PET scan, and he feels the best right of way is key hole surgery.
I think it is human nature to look for hope, so far, in the past 4 and half years I have been lucky enough to find it on a number of occasions. I just hope that luck remains.
Finding out that my chemotherapy as stopped working is sad news, but, knowing I have options isn’t.
Throughout this cancer journey, the situations have taken me to directions I was not expecting, but, like in life, I guess you just got to do the best you can do, with what you are given.