Forgive me. Seriously, in the words of Bryan Adams ‘please forgive me, I know not what I do’. Every time somebody has asked me recently if I was done with my blog, it strengthened my resolve to complete a blog. I am far from finished with the blog; that was clear. What was not clear, was how I was going to rip off the gargantuan plaster covering my keyboard and get my thoughts to screen after such a long break and such a massive development. I know I have been neglecting this blog, but do not think I have not been thinking about it. Every other day I look at the WordPress app on my phone, a reminder of my world and I challenge myself to finish a blog that day. Clearly that failed. I get distracted. I probably had to wash and focus on my fluid intake. I am all so easily distracted.
Where was I? Yes, the story I am eventually going to to tell is far from being hot of the press. In terms of speed, if I were a missionary in Africa in at the start of WW1 writing home to tell my family I had fallen in love with Humphrey Bogart, the news of said union would probably have found its way to my family long before I could find the words to explain the last few months of my life.
In my defence and I have a big one, the last few months have been an exhausting and confusing blur. Contrary to what it may look like, I have very limited free time. My main priority has had to be me working out how I feel and how I want to hold myself, which is closely followed by doing daily tasks like washing, eating and forming sentences. No mean feat, all things considered.
To produce something, something not soaked in self pity and embarrassment, it was impossible for me to immediately put all of this in my blog. Please don’t misinterpret me, I have a lot of words in my arsenal, I just do not seem to have the capacity to put them into any form of working order with a hint of wit. My Myeloma has dumbed me down. I have had a strong will to write it, but at each start attempt, if I managed to get any further then the first sentence by inner monologue would start singing a tune of my own creation called “Blah” or I would want to play at Candy Crush and think of nothing. The words would the be lost and more often than not, I then fell asleep. I would then wake, I may be sick and then the cycle starts all over again. It’s an invisible pressure that only I see. I am all too aware that I will get a crispy clear clarity once my words are published out in the Internet ether, but it’s just being able to get in there…
So yes, your forgiveness is something I ask for. I now recommend that you buckle in tight for this is going to be a long one, for this, all of this, has been anything but my finest hour.
My last blog post was a boast, it was not even my boast, it was a boast made by a Medically Trained Person. My life was on track, I’m not sure what track but I was moving in a direction with less drugs, regular stools and finances. I had trepidatiously allowed myself to think more than a month a head. I was moving in a direction that excited me, secretly hoping for and releasing my grip on the thought that My Myeloma was never far away…
As it turns out, I was not far away. Some time after the ‘sweet spot’ comment, I went to St Bart’s for a clinic appointment that I thought nothing of other than my attendance was a requirement. I had become comfortable and my guard was down. Imagine my horror then, when after a lengthy silence and grimaces of concern, the Medicaly Trained Person told me that after months and months of nothing, I had a paraprotein of 4. I don’t really remember what happened after that. I know we discussed scenarios and she tried to but a positive spin on it, but I knew there was only one direction for this development and it was not an error on the test. I had felt it in my bones for weeks but I had been reassured that my new pain was nothing to worry about.
In that morning, I did not cry. I stopped talking. I had one desire after that appointment and one desire only, and that was to get home. Unfortunately, I had to queue for an eternity at phlebotomy and then at the pharmacy before I was allowed to go home. By the pharmacy, my tears were involuntarily coming and it remained that way for several hours. By the time I had walked in my front door and tried to get the words out to Housemate, I was on the floor. The guard was truly down.
All the fear I had about this being the worst relapse I would ever have, the relapse after the hit and hope of allograft, came out of me that late afternoon on my hallway floor and then in my lounge and I have been dealing with fact ever since.
It’s Failure. I feel like it is one big failure. I need to be absolutely clear on this point, the fault is not my donor’s, My Big Sistee’s. She did everything she should have done and more, my body just failed me.I feel like I failed her and everybody else who was hoping for a happier ending for me. I even feel like I failed the people not wishing me well. Trust me when j say that this is not hyperbole; I was and remain devasted.
The weeks that followed were bad. I had slipped deep into a black hole. It was the deepest, darkest pit of a black hole that I tried to keep to myself. I was so embarrassed by this happening once again, dominating lives once again, that bar a handful of people, I kept all developments to myself. As well as worrying about losing my life, I feared this would be a development that would lead me to losing people. I have to be in bed by 09.00pm for goodness sake and I cancel my plans all the time.
I had to wait for what felt like weeks, but really it was only a matter of days, to find out how bad it all was. I fixed my thoughts on it spreading, questioning why my pain had increased so dramatically, so quickly, self diagnosing secondary cancers with aplomb, and then plotted what the next steps would be, all without talking to a Medically Trained Person. The 2016 I had envisaged for myself was quickly slipping away from my grasp.
For the first time since all this started over four years ago, I asked myself whether it was all worth it. I questioned whether I wanted any treatment at all. I didn’t know what my treatment would be. As far as I was concerened, in my darkest thoughts, I was on a one way track to palliative care. To add just that extra bit of sweet icing to the cake, I was also managing a fast deterioration of my bones. The pain was constant and restrictive; and included no bending, assistance required getting out of bed and off the toilet and no picnics to name but a few. I still worry about travelling long distances along in case I get too tired. I have once again lost my independence and I didn’t feel like I could share it with anybody. It was too sad.
I couldn’t talk to anybody about this. Perhaps the scariest thing of all were my thoughts about how I would die both naturally and unnaturally, as I tried to decide which option would be best. In those never ending says, all I could see for my life was the at some point soon, not too far away it would end. Perhaps you can understand why I did not want to blog about this. Counselling, lots of counselling had to come first.
I have always been realistic when it comes to my treatment, but I dropped my guard when I heard the sweet words of the ‘sweet spot’. There is no way of knowing if I would have handled it all better if I had been better prepared. If, during bouts of down time, I had not allowed myself to day dream about usual 32 year old stuff, maybe not the babies for I am a realist, but I would dream about independence, love (I’m talk under-the-covers-kind) and just living. I thought and planned for a life where I was not just going through the motions of my drug regimen.
I could not then and still can I not see how I can reconcile this with relapsing. All my peers are moving in one direction, their direction whilst I feel like a am treading water until the day I am told that the Medically Trained People can do no more. There are times when I feel I am the saddest, poorest spinster, adult child that there ever has been. I know that the more drugs I take the harder it will be to keep hold of my former self. There will be more staring into space as I try to follow a conversation and more Friday night’s out longing for my bed by 7.30pm, afraid to tell my friends that I am struggling to hear what they are saying.
All the time I was fighting the peak of battle in my head, I was being poked and prodded and then waiting for the Medical Trained People to give me the low down. To be precise, give Mamma Jones or Housemate the lowdown; I was in no fit state to hear it myself. There was too much waiting. I was in what can only politely be described as a heightened sense of anxiety. Looking back, it is a wonder I held it together as well as I did. Potentially, I thought that each test would show that I was on a priority boarding ticket to the kicked bucket, but alas, that was not the case. My biopsy result did not have any active cancel cells in it, which even my brain worked out was better news than cancer being present. My scan did show new disease in my pelvis, both hips, both arms, both shoulder blades my ribs and in my cervical spine, but as far as I know, there was nothing requiring urgent attention. I have been told to be very careful, which means no lifting, very limited walking and no picnics. I could add more to the list, but I conscious of my word count. Just imagine an even bigger loss of independence.
I mean no disrespect when I say that the only good thing to come from all of this is my transfer back to UCLH. The reason for the transfer is related to drug funding. One should never underestimate the benefit of being able to email a Medically Trained Person and have them respond to you and make you feel worthwhile. I feel safe at UCLH. I emailed the team at UCLH to inform them of my relapse and do you know how long it was before they had phoned me to see if I was coping? 15 minutes. That makes all the difference to me (KEEP OUR NHS ❤️!).
We now quickly and smoothly enter the next phase in my treatment. I like to call it the brain altering, stomach churning, sick phase or to put it more simply, The Drug Phrase. I have limited say on my treatment and I am happy with this. I trust my Doctors to prescribe me the right course of treatment. That is not to say that they have not been without their teething problems. Did I mention a propensity to vomit?
I am currently on a course of oral chemotherapy supported by a four weekly dose of Zometa for my bones. I am on a daily tablet of Revlimid, a weekly tablet called Ixazomib, which is basically an oral form of the Cilit Bang I was on in 2013-14, all washed down a healthy dose of Dexamethasone or steroids to you and me. I had increased my MST to 120mg twice a day to manage the pain, but became so constipated, I could not eat and the side effects became worse than the pain itself. Got it? With my supporting meds included, I am currently on between 24-40 pills a day. My first cycle was intolerable. I got into bed on a Monday and walked out of it a fortnight later and 8kg lighter. The following cycle was easier to bear, but nothing can remove fatigue as the unpredictable ruler of my life.
For the unitiated reader, the fatigue I have with chemotherapy goes far and beyond me feeling a little tired. At it’s worst, I cannot move, I cannot sleep or I oversleep, I fall asleep with the cooker on, showering takes two hours due to rests breaks and I have no capacity for a challenge. A slight problem to you, is a huge, gigantic issue for me. I once earned a fairly respectable BA and last week, I spent at least 10 hours fretting about how I would zip up a dress in a hotel. As a consequence I increasingly find myself going from docile to dogged in a matter of seconds. My fatigue gives me anywhere from 30 minutes to four hours of ‘good hours a day before I have to crawl back on my bed or the sofa. The beautiful part is that I cannot predict when or where it is going to hit.
I could go on and on about my recent experiences and do not worry, I will. I have now brown the seal. I already have a fairly detailed analysis of my bowel movement coming your way soon. For now however, I will end this blog.
I will however say this, the day I started my treatment, the first day I took my new regimen I had no doubt in my head that I was going the right thing. There was no doubt. I felt empowered. If I have taken one thing away this last four years it is that my illness is not just about me. I do not know what the future holds, but I know that I am not yet ready to let things happen without me. There will be days when I will doubt this, the feelings of ‘woe is me’ are inevitable and healthy. For me, right now, I am glad I was just given had the opportunity to regurgitate last night’s dinner. I am glad that I am likely to spend all day in bed feeling like I have been hit over the head with a sack of potatoes. I’m not glad about all of this because nothing remotely fun is going to happen with my day. I am glad because at some point in my near future, I will be able to do something worthwhile and right now, that is the only thing I can ask for.
EJB x
P.S. For all those myeloma sufferers out there; this works for me. This is my story. Please do not feel like I am telling you how to behave and do. You follow your path.
