Well, I finally finished my chemotherapy at West Suffolk Hospital. It was 18 weeks of being poisoned. Each of the six sessions became harder to deal with and I felt more and more tired the closer we came to the end of the treatment. I am very pleased to have that period done with, to say the least.
Although I had been going in to work as much as I could during my treatment, I only managed one day in the last six weeks, so it was a bit of a shock to the system to finally start my return to work a couple of weeks ago.
It is actually a really unsettling time at the end of chemotherapy. This is for a number of reasons, some physical and others psychological. Clearly after chemo your body has taken a quite a beating. Not only do you feel weak and incredibly fatigued, but you have to deal with the obvious physical effects such as hair loss, and in my case, weight gain, especially my face. At the same time as this you are also unsure about how successful the chemo has been and what the immediate and long term future holds. It is no surprise that you feel vulnerable and extremely fragile at this point, and then to add to this you go back to work and try and pick up where you left off before you were diagnosed with cancer!
It is not surprising that I felt nervous driving to work on my first day back, but I had a lovely welcome from my catering team, including a good number of hugs which really helped me start to settle back in. I did work half days to start with, but after a few days I began to feel that I needed to prove that I could still do everything that I did before I was ill. I then tried to work a full week including an afternoon tea for 100 guests on the Saturday. I am sure that you can guess that this left me absolutely drained and feeling worse than I had before I went back to work.
I am not sure why, but I had not spoken to my doctor about going back. I put this right last week and was given sensible advice and told that it may take two months of a phased return, working shorter hours before I will be back to ‘normal’. Anyway, I now feel more settled about what I should be able to achieve and I won’t feel like I am failing if I can’t do it all straight away. For those of you who don’t know, I work as catering manager at Framlingham College in Suffolk, which is an independent boarding school. I have added a few photos below to give you an idea of where I work.
The front of the senior school.
Above – The main dining room. Below is the school’s promotional video.
