Chemommunity

A scientifically-factual account of my insides.

When I was a lot younger than I am now, I looked forward in fevered anticipation to the time when I’d need my first x-ray. Not because in some horribly sado-masochistic way I was hoping for a broken bone, but because I thought it would be then, and only then, that I would be confirmed as special. Not just brilliantly unique, but scientifically “Get the President” kind of one-in-a-million. I was convinced that my body was more likely to be made up of Fraggles and Doozers than bones and joints. That I would be lying there watching as teams of ever-more-important Doctor’s and Surgeons were ushered into the X-Ray theatre to review the miraculous findings as the prints were sent off to Britain’s equivalent of Area 51 for comparison. It was through snorted disdain that when I finally did require such tests I was ushered out of the hospital without so much as a “Sir there’s something we need to discuss with you, but first a call from The White House…”.

You see, my point is, that by and large we don’t change an awful lot. We grow and we mature and we learn (so far so Jeremy Kyle) but essentially I’m still the precocious little shitflap who can’t see any reason why he shouldn’t be the best at everything he turns his hand to. And this includes Chemotherapy. My hope going into my treatment was that the symptoms so commonly associated with ‘Chemo’ (sickness, fatigue, hair loss, ulcers, etc.) would not appear at all and I’d be first in history to sail through untainted by it’s toxic hand. Initial signs were not great.

My treatment consists of 3 ‘cycles’ of drug therapy.

The irony of my t-shirt was completely lost on my first day at hospital.

Each cycle starts with a period of 5/6 days in hospital where I am pumped full of Ifosfamide, Etoposide and Cisplatin for 20 hours each day before being sent home to rest for 2 weeks before the next cycle. It’s in the period of ‘rest’ that your white blood cell count drops and you are left to feel the full (side) effects. My first few days in hospital were a breeze of friends, family and food. The next few were pretty ropey.

My temperature soared and I could barely get out of bed. The worst part of it all is that, for all but about 4 hours of the day (and night), you are connected to a drip. I can’t tell you how quickly I lost patience with my bladder’s insistence that, despite deliberately not having drunk anything for the past few hours, it would very much like now to deposit as close to a litre of liquid into the bathroom. ‘A litre’ you ask? Yes a litre. ‘How do I know’, you definitely don’t ask? Well I’ve been told to ‘log’ (sorry) amount going in with the amount going out in case my kidneys pack up from treatment.

Thumbs up. N.B. The coil of tubing. Cute, yes? No.

Anyway, I was finally unplugged and sent on my unsteady way, accompanied by my sister back home to stock up the fridge and prepare to hibernate.

Except that’s not really how it’s worked out. Other than a couple of days where I’ve spent most of the day sleeping, I’ve been pretty much ok. I’ve managed to get out and I haven’t yet been sick. I have experienced some cravings and changes in my taste-buds. But this is no worse than expecting a lime chilli taco and getting a mouthful of oyster-hammock. In fact the worst part so far has been the fact that for the first week my brain has been replaced by a satchel full of fog and wet wipes.  I’ve developed a sudden incapacity to remember where I was coming from or going to. Like walking into a room and not only forgetting why you’re there but wondering how it is that gravity works. This goes for conversations too. Beyond simply losing track of your train of thoughts, I have got to the point where I find myself looking in on my on conversation watching the whole thing implode in a cloud of ash and ‘WTF’. Everything seems to take a lot longer, and generally needs restarting (e.g. I began this blog post in 1989). Now, where was I? Oh yes, The Cuban Missile Crisis…

What? This old thing? How embarrassing.

So far, so to be expected. Then I ran out of a couple of my anti-sickness drugs (one of which my oncologist said was ‘total shit’ anyway) and for some strange reason I have now returned almost completely back to normal. I should emphasise the ‘strange’ there as well, given that I was left  a message from said oncologist this afternoon who told me that after my blood was taken yesterday, they’ve found that my white blood cell count has dropped prematurely and that I was most likely experiencing chronic fatigue. I listened to this message whilst enjoying a meal at Wagamama‘s shortly after a 30 minute run. I’m now beginning to wonder whether in fact the bags full of toxic chemicals weren’t mistakenly replaced by a large pouch of Um Bongo.

YAY! CANCER!

Through the course of the final week before I was due to go into hospital I must have looked like a ‘bucket-lister’. Every meal I had, or friend I saw was ‘the last before treatment’. I rushed around seeing as many people as I could, packing in as much fun as possible. I even raced up to Norfolk with a friend the day before hospital to drive an old sports car to the beach where I lay wondering if it might be alright if we could all ‘forget about the whole cancer thing thank you very much’. But it came. And went. As did hospital. And you know what? It’s not been that bad*.  So here I am, almost 2 weeks down. 7 weeks to go. I’m about to go to the gym. At least I think it was the gym. It was the gym or Button Moon. One of the two. Let’s just hope I don’t break anything and need that X-Ray.

(*this line will be deleted if it gets really bad – never, ever quote me on it).

Heh! Come Party!

There’s nothing I like less than being beaten by something. Firstly, as you may well know, I’m an athlete. Losing is just awful. It’s painful. So when I’ve had a blog written, proofread and ready to post for the past week or so, I really don’t like having the point of that blog undermined. You see, if you’d read my last post, you’ll know that I was at a quandary. I needed to decide as to whether I should take preventative chemotherapy for the cancer that had just been cut out or whether to wait and hope it didn’t return. The reason I say that this has all been undermined, sadly, is that the cancer has spread.

Last week, I developed a throbbing backache which I was sure hadn’t come from training. It felt very much like a sack full of sticklebricks was being slowly forced into my left kidney by an impatient child attempting to understand the process of osmosis with a hammer. I knew this wasn’t good as it was the one thing I kept being asked by my oncologist when he was trying to establish how severe my cancer was in the first place. Then over the weekend in a wild gesticulation of storytelling brilliance* (*flapping about excitedly) I skimmed a lump on my neck, just above my shoulder blade. On its own, simply a swollen gland perhaps but I knew this was where a lymph node sat and combined with the backache I resigned myself to the fact that I was probably facing a recurrence. Well I say that, what I actually suggested to my friend at the time was that it was probably the beginnings of the same issue undergone by Richard E Grant in How to Get Ahead in Advertising and that a more straight-talking Leo was ready to burst out of my neck.

So it turns out that there were some little cancer cells kicking around in my system and they’ve decided to find a new home in my lymphatic system and my lungs. I called my Oncologist on Monday and he ordered me straight in to see him followed by a blood test and CT Scan. They all showed that despite being given the all clear only 3 weeks before with only 25% chance of a return, I had already managed to find new homes for the cheeky little chaps. How hospitable of me. So not only am I an able sportsman, musician, artistic, academic – sorry you get the idea – but, as it turns out, I’m also bloody good at cancer.

The more eagle-eyed readers will have spotted that the title of this blog isn’t a macabre spin on my recent attitude towards death or cancer but an anagram of ‘Chemotherapy‘. So now the decision has been made. Or rather it’s been taken away from me. I am due to start 3 doses of ‘VIP chemo‘ next week. This isn’t my final attempt at getting any kind of special treatment but an alternative treatment to the standard ‘BEP’ Chemotherapy that is given to most testicular cancer sufferers. The main reason for this is that, despite the fact it is quite a bit more toxic and has worse side effects, it should leave me with no lung damage which one of the ingredients of ‘BEP’ is prone to. They will each take 21 days and involve an initial 5 days in hospital. During this time I’ll have the three different toxic chemicals pumped into my system before being sent home to let them take hold of my immune system, eradicate most of my protective white blood cells and then allow me a week to recuperate before the cycle starts over. So in total I’ll be ‘in treatment’ for 63 days before I am able to attempt any sort of recovery. It’s an odd feeling. In fact feeling is probably the wrong word. Knowing that the treatment itself will be more troubling than the issue it’s attempting to cure. But I am led to believe it’s extremely effective and I know many people have to endure way worse. I am, however, expecting it to be hellish.

I should quickly return to the part many of you have asked me about since the last post. That being, the results of my super-funstravaganza poll. They are thus:

To all those 'Boobs' out there, you're lucky this was Anonymous.

I can’t say I’m hugely surprised by the results. I think that most people have naturally looked to eradicate the issue immediately, and I didn’t expect anyone to appreciate how much I want to succeed in my sport. Therefore, I had originally decided with my Oncologist that I would take my chances and hope the cancer didn’t recur. Now, for all those smug little smirkingtons out there ready to say “I told you so”, I will add that I’ve since been told that the speed at which the cancer has returned would have meant that the single ‘preventative’ dose would not have been enough. See? I’m THAT good at cancer. So THERE!

Probably the hardest part of this all is the fact that I have to snuff out the flickering embers of hope I had for having any success in my athletics this season and I am having to come to terms with the, now growing, possibility that I won’t get another chance ever. No one knows how badly you’ll be affected by the treatment and how many of the side effects will remain with you, but I have to focus on staying alive first and kicking the living shit out of my sport afterwards. It was pretty heart-breaking to have to put away my athletics kit for the season as early as June, despite the fact I was breaking my personal bests with every outing. I had even just spent almost £500 on new specialist footwear. But I am now even more determined to train harder than I thought possible in order to find the success I am seeking. Many of you may point to Lance Armstrong and the fact he won the Tour de France twice after his surgery and chemotherapy but then he was 25 when that happened. A relative youngster in the sport. And a sport in which it’s possible to continue on later into your 30s given the non-reliance on fast-twitch muscle fibres (the first to lose their effectiveness in age), but I am 32 already. By the time I’m recovered fully (if that happens at all) I’ll be on my way to 34. This is an age almost no athlete, and certainly no Decathlete really continues through, irrespective of a body riddled with cancer.

Anyway, I’ve been alright about it. I’ve started preparing myself by reading up as much as possible. I’ve got my pessimistic expectations on DEFCON 10 so that I am not surprised by how awful it is. Interestingly I have found a huge amount of supportive and detailed information on the Macmillan Cancer website‘s Forum. I was however a little taken aback by one of the threads regarding remedies for particular side effects. Having asked a relatively straight-forward question about what whether there was an effective alternative to avoid the revolting Bonjela for expected sore gums, I got the very sharp reply “For God’s sake just try some, ginger!”. Slightly offended that someone had chosen this forum for name-calling, how could she know, if my profile picture was black and white, that in *SOME LIGHT* my hair has flecks of red (shut up)? The penny finally dropped that the sentence contained an errant comma and that one of the best thing for this ailment is ginger – the root.

So yes, I’m a sore loser. It’s hard-wired into my competitive psyche. When I mentioned what had happened to fellow multi-eventer turned 400m runner, Olympic Medallist Kelly Sotherton her response was that I’d come back lighter and more aerodynamic for my aerobic training. Now I know she’s joking (you were, right Kelly?) but it goes a long way to giving an indication of just how single-minded you need to be. It’s not that as athletes we are in denial, more that there is no room for negativity. There’ll always be others more than happy to provide that. Success requires an unfaltering, bloody-minded, blinkered belligerence. After all, no one else is going to get up and run repeatedly up a snow-covered hill at 9am on a Saturday morning in winter.

To give you an idea of the joys we athletes endure, this past year I ran so hard that on the final ‘rep’ of my session, I reached the top and threw up a pile of virtually undigested Cheerios. So far, so standard for those of us used to heavy lactic training in winter. What I wasn’t expecting was a passing walker to lose control of her Yorkshire Terrier who circled me a few times before diving in and lapping up said breakfast with glee. On its own, already quite the image. Imagine then when you are feeling as ill as I already was how this might appear to someone hunched over, gasping for air only inches away from the feverish inhalation of sloppy cereal and bile. This scene only improves when I tell you that it only resulted in me somehow finding a little more inside and ejecting another bilious, biscuity cocktail all over the little cretin’s back. Seeing the owner’s horrified face was about the only time I managed a smile that day.

So you’ll appreciate  that what drives me in training will also drive me through this. I didn’t like being beaten to the last blog post by my this latest recurrence. I don’t like being beaten in sport. But I certainly won’t be beaten by the cancer.

Now, where’s that ginger…