All is well in Cancerland

It's offical: I am 17 months NED! Can we say I'm cured? Technically no but fuck it, I am going to believe that I am. I am still on 6-monthly check ups for now as I am so high-risk but it has been 17 months since my last known met was removed. Huzzah! Can I celebrate by going on holiday again? Because it was bloody ace!

I'm really bad at blogging

It's not because I have nothing to say; I did mean to write a couple of weeks ago about the mole and potential met I had removed from my right thigh (I'm still waiting for the results). I've not been writing for two reasons:
1) I am still absolutely drained from the sepsis in June. A charity called Sepsis Alliance says it can take up to a year to recover your energy but the problem is that you look fine and are behaving fine so the after-effects become like an invisible illness. It certainly doesn't help that I have been working 50-60 hours a week for three months straight but the thing is, I work in an industry where people would trample their dead mother to get an opportunity. While my colleagues and boss are lovely, I dare not show weakness because TV is an industry without pity. It is so difficult to find work and I cannot give anybody any excuse to let me go. So yeah, I am exhausted all the time. Things are improving slowly - 8 weeks ago I was sleeping through the entire weekend. At least I can stay awake for it now and I don't feel so much like I have ran a marathon when I wake up, more that I have just got back from the gym.
2) I am really forgetful these days, and I think that's also related to the sepsis. Case in point is this paragraph: forgetfulness wasn't going to be my second reason but in the 5 minutes since I started typing this post, I've forgotten what I was going to write. So let's just go with forgetfulness.
3) I have remembered now. It is that when I was diagnosed, everything in the melanoma world was so new and newsworthy. I was someone who never even went to the GP so hospitals were utterly alien environments. But that was almost 3 years ago, and at some unidentifiable point in time, all of this ceased being actively terrifying and just became distant background noise, like when you're in a dull meeting and your mind wanders. You're still vaguely aware that someone's talking but you've mostly tuned them out. Now and then I tune in again, like when I have an appointment or a scan or a biopsy, but day to day I tend to not think about it. Weird how the mind works, isn't it? This thing will mostly end my life but I have adapted to live with it and ignore it. I am getting on with life. And later this month I am going here and will be able to snorkel, scuba, drink cocktails in a hammock and generally fulfil 3 or 4 things off my bucket list. I am too excited. For now, life is good!

Hold your breath.

NB - I wrote this in the hospital waiting room last month, but the internet signal was non-existant. The scan results were good and showed a reduction in lymph node size.
Hold your breath. That's my tip if you have to drink a litre of contrast juice before you have a CT scan. It tastes pretty horrible. I have to drink it over an hour and a half so I can't even just neck it. Apparently it will give me diarrhoea too, although I've not been allowed to eat today anyway.
Everyone in the waiting room has brought someone with them except for me. I've never understood this. I undertsand moral support but I am more a fan of standing on my own two feet and not imposing on anyone. I want to be independant, and I don't want to inconvenience Alex by making him stay for two hours in a boring, depressing waiting room.
Plus the woman who just left brought her (presumably) husband with her, and when she came out after her scan, he was positively quizzing her in a really weird intense manner: did you have to hold your breath? Did they inject you? Were they competent? Did you fall out the scanner? He wouldn't let her leave til she'd answered everything. Jesus, you control freak of a man, give it a rest and let her go home!
Also in the waiting room is a blind lady and her guide dog, plus her sighted friend who is training a guide dog puppy. They are cheering everyone up as the golden retriever keeps chewing up whatever he can find - tissue, leaflets, his lead.
Another half an hour of drinking this muck til I can be scanned. I'm bored and hungry.

Scans, surgery, feeling shit

I thought I'd posted here after my check up in July but I guess not. Then again, thanks to work, this summer has pretty much passed me by. Literally, I am working 50-60 hours a week, every week, and have been doing my open water scuba qualification at the weekends. I am seriously shattered.
So when I saw Dr Stewart, she didn't know (surprise surprise) that I had been in hospital. She went and had a quick look at my notes, came back and asked me if anyone had let me know that the CT they did had shown suspicious enlargement of the lymph nodes in my pelvis (no, course they hadn't). She wrote to a good radiologist at the hospital, who recommended I be rescanned in November to compare the nodes and check it was just infection causing the enlargement, not cancer.
However a fortnight ago, I developed really bad pain in my pelvis, lower spine and legs. I don't think really heavy scuba equipment has helped, nor has the sheer volume of work I've been doing, but a few days ago, when I realised it was the same or worse, I asked for my CT scan to be brought forward. The wonderful Catherine, who is Dr Stewart's secretary, sorted it out even though Dr S was away. So I will have the scan tomorrow morning at Wigan Infirmary, the same place I was at in June and the same department who spilled a whole bag of contrast fluid into my arm causing 24 hours of severe nausea and pain. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. Once I know it's not mets and the nodes have gone down, I will be happy.
I will find out on or before 17th September when I go back to Dr S for surgery to remove the probable met on my leg and a mole next to it that caught her eye. Surgery is 4 weeks before my bucket list holiday to the Maldives so I need to make sure I rest and let it heal. Cannot wait for that holiday coz I feel like crap and I am utterly knackered.

Cellulitis again. Hospital again.

They say no news is good news, so the fact I'm posting should alert you to summat being up.
So Saturday 7th June, about 6.45 in the morning, I'm lying in bed when my right femur and hip suddenly start hurting. Like, really hurting. Thinking I'm lying funny, I shift but nothing dims the pain. Five minutes later I am shivering, and within half an hour I have serious rigors and a red leg. I'd also had a bad headache for a week. Hello systematic cellulitis. Hello ambulance.
Actually, I tell a lie. My leg wasn't red at that point so my immediate thought was bone mets in my hip and leg. After four hours in A&E, it was quite the relief to see cancer leg was crimson.
I'm going to cut this post short because it followed the same plot as May 2012. So here are the highlights:
9 cannulas
Yes, over 8 days in the medical assessment unit, my veins managed to collapse enough that I needed multiple cannulas per day, plus many more attempts to get them in. When they ran out of veins in my hands, arms and wrists, they started looking at my feet: thank god the only usable vein was in the crease where ankle and foot meet so it wasn't really feasible. After a nurse, foundation doctor and SHO all failed to get the last cannula in, they started talking about a central line in my neck and I was actually all for that, because my arms were so bruised and painful. Luckily, some smart bugger got the 9th and final cannula in after three attempts, and thanks to my heroic efforts at not moving or bending my arm for 36 hours (which, believe me, is very painful) we didn't need the central. Special thanks to the nurse who didn't bother telling me I no longer needed a cannula until I asked that night. Cheers, I really enjoyed the extra 8 hours of pain and non-movement.
Meningitis scare
Despite me telling them I had cellulitis which had turned into sepsis, they insisted on treating me for meningitis for the first 60 hours. The side effects of the anti-virals included limb paralysis and hallucinations (I 'saw' people in bed with me and in my room, including a clown, a murderer and a vampire. Quite terrifying.) They then decided to do a lumbar puncture and I knew it was going to be bad when they brought a nurse in whose specific job was to let me squeeze her hands. In the end, it took four attempts and lots of screaming and crying. Turns out they needed a longer needle to get to my spinal fluid. My favourite line that day came on the fourth attempt: "maybe we should give it a minute for the anaesthetic to work". Yes, there's an idea!
CT cock up
So after a head CT on the Sunday, they decided to do a body CT on the Tuesday. I said, please put the contrast in very slowly as my veins are tiny, and check the cannula is in first. As it happens, they did neither of those things, which resulted in me receiving an arm full of CT contrast dye. I CANNOT TELL YOU HOW MUCH THIS HURT. Basically my vein collapsed under the pressure of the dye being injected, I started screaming "Stop! Stop!" and the nurse said "It'll all be in in a second", totally missing the point that I wanted him to STOP INJECTING! The result was a rock solid shoulder, bicep and tricep for 24 hours, a horrific metal taste like the usual but x 1000000, and a night spent vomiting stomach acid as I hadn't really eaten since Saturday at that point.
I am sure there's more but those were the highlights. On the Friday, I could move onto oral meds so I got discharged and out of there as fast as I could. I am on the mend now, helped along by 18 antibiotics a day plus 3 anti-emetics and 6 NSAIDS for the phlebitis (vein inflammation) in my left hand and arm caused by the IVs. Not that you asked, but I've also got c diff and thrush...splendid antibiotic side effects. Scarily, I have no idea what caused the cellulitis, and that worries me because I don't know how to prevent it. I do, however, know maths so based on my history of May 2012 and Jun 2014, I can confidently predict my next bout will be in July 2016!
In other news, I've had a number of moles whipped off since I last wrote, a few of which were atypical (as in, pre-cancerous), including one on my chest which has annoyingly left a large angry red scar. Ah well, better scarred than dead.
Finally, another teeny met has set up shop in the usual place on my leg. I've been watching with interest as it appears to have stopped growing for now, but I will flag it on Monday when I see Dr S.
That's everything. Enjoy these photos:

Happy New Year

Another year done and I'm still here. Not much to report since my last post really, but I did want to document some of the List for Living stuff I've done since being diagnosed. If there's one good thing to have come from having cancer, it's having the kick up the arse to get my bucket list ticked off.

#9 - Abseil (420 feet)

#10 - Write a book

#12 - Experience a sensory deprivation tank

#14 - Go in a helicopter

#21 & #36 - Go on a segway / Visit the Berlin Wall (2 for 1 here!)

#26 - Visit Pompei

#30 - Fly a plane

#33 - Caving

#37 - Indoor skydiving

#38 - Feast of Cakes and Desserts

#47 - See a shooting star

Not bad considering! I am going to definitely do a lot more of them in 2014 and hopefully there will be very little action on the cancer front. My dermatologist Dr Stewart was a little shocked I had so much trouble getting a scan so she's said I can have an annual CT scan at her hospital. She said something touching, which was that she wouldn't normally have this conversation with a patient but she doesn't know how I cope so well. She said she thinks she'd fall to pieces and it must be like sitting on a time bomb. Yep, that sums it up!