Fifth Chemo Done
Well, here we go again. I had my fifth chemo yesterday. While the last one was harder than the previous sessions, I still felt well enough to go ahead on schedule. This one was a little different in that Ellie joined us as she had a presentation with the My WiSH charity in recognition of her achievement of raising over £2,000 to go towards the MacMillan unit treating me. Well done Ellie and thank you to every one who supported her head shaving event.
As our appointment was at 12:30 we ended up having a family picnic in the chemo day room, while I was being filled with more ‘poison’, as our consultant put it! It was a warm sunny day and bizarrely was actually quite a pleasant day out.
When we have been for previous sessions it has been really busy, but oddly yesterday was very quiet in comparison, with lots of empty chairs. We saw Lisa, the clinical trials nurse to discuss how I am feeling now that I am taking the metformin twice a day. She gives me a detailed lifestyle questionnaire to fill in, which goes through a whole range of topics including emotional and physical side effects. I won’t bore you with the actual questions, but some are fairly general ones covering pain and fatigue etc, but there are also a number of more intimate queries covering bowel habits, depression, sexual activity, appetite, urinary problems and so on! They want to know the whole picture so they can gauge whether the treatment is suitable to introduce as the normal process for prostate cancer in future. So I feel happy that I am doing my bit for research. I also have my weight measured and this gone up a little since I started treatment in January and I have developed what Lisa described as a steroid ‘moon face’. I have definitely noticed a round face looking back at me in the mirror and my collars have become a much snugger fit. Hopefully I will regain my handsome ‘chiselled’ look, as Bim put it, when I have stopped taking them. (I think she may be overstating things a bit there!)
We always ask for the latest PSA results at our chemo sessions and we are pleased to see that it has come down again to 1.2. It can’t drop much further, so we are happy with where it is now. The main aim is to try and keep it low for as long as possible. After the chemotherapy course has finished this will be through regular three monthly hormone implants and the ongoing metformin treatment.
There will be cake!
The next chemo session in three weeks time will be the last, and while it has not been anyway near as difficult as I had feared so far, I have to say I am looking forward to finishing the process. All the nurses and chemo team in general have been wonderful, so we will definitely need to celebrate the last session in the best way we know how, with a selection of homemade cakes and biscuits as a thank you to all of them.
I don’t feel too bad immediately after my chemo, so we have developed a chemo day tradition of a jacket potato supper. Last night we had Dan and Ellie with us so I fired up our Kamado Joe charcoal oven barbecue and had lovely crispy, smokey potatoes which was a good way to end the day.
