The loneliness of scan-time

I’ve been dithering as to whether to write yet another post about pre-scan nerves. The urge to try and express and explain some of the cancer chaos that goes on in my head tends to come to a fore when my scans are imminent and even more so prior to the 6 monthly brain MRIs. However, my reluctance to write is that I’m so bored of saying the same thing. Part of what I hate about scan time is the absolute monotony of the same old fears, same old anxiety, same old panic as to whether my luck has once again run out.

On top of the absolute frustration and boredom is that it doesn’t get any easier. The fear is just as real every time and the last 4+ years has taught me that you just don’t ever know what to expect. As always I really do know how lucky I am to even be moaning about the monotony but you can’t really live your life day to day feeling lucky that you haven’t died yet…..and the ‘yet’ is the crux of it. Despite the good fortune and good decisions that have kept me alive I’m still sporting an unknown number (their location makes them hard to count!) of unwanted tumours on and around my liver and every time I’ve taken a break from treatment they start growing again and so my position continues to be utterly precarious. It was my ‘bad’ scan last April that led me to having to start on Pembrolizumab a few weeks later. Therefore every scan has the potential to upset the fragile balance.

The brain scans are the worst as the thought of melanoma taking up residence in my head utterly terrifies me. Not just because of the practicalities that it’s harder to treat and I’d have to give up my driving licence but because the thought of something growing in my brain is my last really massive fear in relation to this horrible disease and I don’t think it’s one I’d bounce back from with any great speed. The problem with an impending scan is very real fears come sneaking out and taking over.

This year the timing of scans, results and treatment has totally stopped us being able to get away over the Easter break and on top of that it’s left me feeling pretty flat. As I’ve said above the pattern of the same emotions is exhausting but it’s also very lonely. I’m bored with the sound of myself saying the same old stuff. So bored, that generally I’ve chosen not to talk about it. Plus it’s always a bit of a downer to explain that it’s scan time again and that as always I’m in a state of uncertainty and terror!

The reality is that I just won’t know anything until next week and until then I’m torturing myself with all the possibilities – my delightful insomnia/nightmares duo is back and I’m constantly reminded of how incredibly different and warped my life has become. My friends and family as always are amazing and supportive but there is a weight of responsibility which comes with being the patient and so not only can I think about little else other than what my cancer is doing I also don’t want to once again be the bearer of bad news. It’s hard not to feel quite detached and isolated despite everyone’s kindness and my own efforts to stay busy but there’s nothing like scan-time to remind me that stage IV cancer is no walk in the park.

 

 

 

Advertisements

Another Brussels Adventure

Last night I returned home from my 4^th MPNE conference in Brussels and as always after these events I’m utterly exhausted, totally inspired and already missing all my melanoma friends. It seems extraordinary that a group of people who are brought together by something as vile as cancer can form such strong and joyful friendships.

This year’s conference was held in the same hotel as the first one that I went to back in 2015 and it was odd to think back over the previous years and realise how much has changed, how much I’ve been taught and what a rollercoaster of a journey the last few years have been.

Back in 2015 when I was on my first lot of immunotherapy – (Ipilumumab and Nivolumab on the blinded trial) I applied to go to the conference realising that as a stage IV cancer patient I needed to learn as much as I possibly could about the disease. What I didn’t expect was that I’d develop side effects from the drugs and ended up hospitalised in the days running up to the conference. I was so set on going that I was eventually able to persuade my consultant to discharge me with the promise that I was going to be surrounded by medics should anything go wrong. I arrived home from the Marsden on the Thursday evening and set off early the next morning to Brussels with a suitcase full of antibiotics, steroids and as it turned out no socks.

The conference was brilliant and my recent bout of side effects stood me in good stead for workshops about the risks that patients are willing to take. We are far less risk-averse than our doctors and carers and having just experienced grade 3 side effects first hand I was very clear where my priorities stood. I knew very few people who were attending the conference but those that I did know were lovely and welcoming plus I finally got to meet the phenomenal team behind MPNE. I also got to spend time with my much missed friend Lori. She was dreadfully ill that weekend and despite our plan to travel home together I had to leave her in Brussels as she was hospitalised with pneumonitis. Considering how ill she was – she still gave an extraordinarily powerful talk about her fight to access treatment and quite how much risk she was willing to take.

The first conference was a total eye-opener and like so many first time attendees I felt like a total fraud I was very much a patient and not a patient advocate and felt that whilst I learned a lot I gave nothing back and whilst I did join in with some discussions I was extremely shy. The following year, to my surprise, the indefatigable Bettina asked whether I’d be willing to give a talk about what the 2016 MPNE theme – knowledge is power – meant to me as a patient. To my even greater surprise I agreed to do it. How could I not – all those involved in MPNE work tirelessly to engage, inspire and ultimately empower everyone who attends so really when they ask you to do anything it is impossible to say no. Plus, the lovely Lori had died in November 2015 and remembering her passion and bravery (hate that word in relation to cancer but blimey she was brave) there was no way I wasn’t going to give it a go. In the months before she died, despite how ill she was, she’d been encouraging me to get more involved in MPNE and been gently pushing me to find my voice.

So in March 2016, I’d had got over my upset that I was off the trial, I’d had a lovely 9 month break from treatment and was several doses into my Ipi/Nivolumab re-challenge. I was beginning to realise that whilst I might not be the most proactive patient advocate my treatment story was important. There are still very few melanoma patients who’ve done this drug re-challenge and I was happy to tell my story as well as glean any information from those attending and talking as to what the likelihood of it working was! At the first conference I had been pretty knackered from the recent side effects and hospital admission at this second conference I was 3 doses into my 4 lots of ipi/nivo and was suffering from a fine combination of fatigue, facial flushing and an extremely dry mouth. None of these things make giving a talk very easy but I did it and once I’d stopped shaking with nerves I was very proud of myself for stepping so far out of my comfort zone and not totally screwing it up.

Forward another year and it was MPNE2017 and this time I was not on any treatment (having completed my re-challenge in April 2016) and was remarkably full of energy and was able to rush around doing a little Brussels sight-seeing in the tiny windows of downtime in the conference programme. Again, I’d been asked to speak and this time it was talk about how much an additional 3 months was worth. The talk was inspired by a workshop that I’d been to in London when I’d been appalled that an additional 3 months of life was considered of so little value and it really reinforced for me how essential the patient voice must be in any discussions about treatment and the value of life. It seems that even without me realising the whole patient advocacy thing was seeping into my life and making me bolder and braver about stating my views. This conference was brilliant – highly informative and beautifully put together and it was so lovely to catch up with a group of people who over the years had become my friends. I’ve talked before in other posts about how nice it is to spend time with other people who are also living with melanoma and I realise that part of the pleasure is that you don’t actually need to talk about your cancer story beyond a brief recap because these people live it too and understand all the ins and outs without any explanation.

So finally to this year’s conference and again it was a brilliant programme. For the second year running I was asked to provide bags of florenteenies for the MPNE faculty and so once again travelled to Brussels with a large suitcase of confectionary and a small rucksack of clothes! There were more small workshops than previous years and this meant it was far easier to join in with discussions and share my views. Plus, finding myself at my fourth conference, surrounded by so many lovely friends that it was impossible to talk to them all, I realised there really was nothing to be scared about. I gave a short talk about my experience of disease progression at stage IV and I helped run a workshop about patient forums both of which went smoothly and I don’t think I disgraced myself! Unlike last year when I was treatment–free and full of energy this year I’m 10 months into Pembrolizumab and finding the fatigue pretty hard work so there was no speedy sight-seeing and instead I perfected the art of the 10 minute power nap in order to make it through the long but fascinating days.

Despite only getting home last night today was a treatment day and I had to set off early to go for my 15^th infusion of Pembro. I started the day feeling pretty tired and tearful and really missing my lovely melanoma friends but thankfully the day went smoothly, my MPNE friends sent my lovely messages and I even managed to squeeze in another one of those magical power naps when I was waiting for treatment so the day ended more cheerfully than it began.

Looking back over the last 4 years of conferences it’s amazing to see how much has happened, not just in terms of the vast amount of immunotherapy I’ve had but in terms of the friendships I’ve made, how much I’ve learnt along the way and how much I feel like I very much belong to the really quite delightful MPNE family who I believe like me for more than must my florenteenies!

 

 

Another amazing milestone

Today is my little Max’s 10th Birthday.

This would probably have always felt pretty significant as to me he’s still absolutely a baby but actually the fact that he’s reached double figures and that I’m here to celebrate it with him seems utterly extraordinary.

My boys were only 5 and 7 when I was told my cancer was terminal and so even seeing Oscar into double figures seemed like a pipe dream and yet here I am, over 4 years later, enjoying Max’s 10^th birthday and feeling pretty blooming happy about it.

Cancer is absolutely shit. It’s a word that no one likes to hear and it’s impossible not to associate it with illness, misery and dying so it’s no wonder that even just the word scares people. However, on days like today, I have to acknowledge that the really weird silver lining is that it teaches you to take stock, to appreciate all the good stuff and so that’s really all this blog post is about. I am feeling incredibly grateful that I’m well and that I get to celebrate another significant birthday will my lovely little boy.

A very reluctant speaker

Years ago when I was doing my MA I discovered that I was expected to give a presentation as part of the course and the thought filled me with such dread and horror that I came up with multiple excuses to why I couldn’t possibly do it. To my great disappointment, I had no choice and had to do the damn thing but I was terrified, it was probably incomprehensible and it convinced me that public speaking and I really don’t mix.

Roll on a few years and throw a bit of life-changing melanoma into the mix and it turns out that there are many things – scans, waiting for scan results, cancer – that are far more terrifying than public speaking and this somewhat useful perspective has led me to being far braver about saying yes when in the past I would definitely have said no. I’ve blogged before about my talks at the MPNE conferences, the Melanoma Patient Conference and the few occasions when I’ve agreed to doing tv interviews. Generally, despite the terrible nerves and the occasion when I got so muddled that I ended up suggesting that my children had got younger and younger as the years went on, I have been happy with the outcome and as much as it’s not a natural situation for me I know that I’d regret not taking the opportunity.

Today, I had a totally crisis of confidence. I’d been asked to give a talk to 100+ GPs at a Skin Cancer training day. As always, my instinct was to say no but actually I was so pleased that they were including the patient voice in the training day that I said yes. I had thought long and hard about what I wanted to say – I’d been determined that I didn’t just want to tell my story but I wanted to highlight the ways in which the interactions between the GP and hospital system could be improved and in the end I was satisfied with what I’d put together.

I was the first speaker after the introduction and so read my piece and then scurried off, as I’m not a GP and so didn’t really belong. On leaving, I convinced myself that I’d made a total fool of myself and wasted everyone’s time and wasted a good patient advocacy opportunity. On reflection, a whole 5 minutes later (!), I realised that it was probably fine that my panic was because there was no opportunity to respond and more importantly – unlike the stuff I’ve done for MPNE – there was no one to squeeze my hand immediately after and tell me that I’d done OK.

This couldn’t have been made more clear by the odd juxtaposition of my slightly lonely talk this morning and the fact that today MPNE released the short film about me that they’d put together based my talk and interview at last year’s conference. The response to this from other members of the group was so kind and very much the virtual hand squeeze that I’d missed earlier. Like most people I’m not a fan of seeing myself on film. I can’t help be appalled at how I look – how twitchy I am and that somehow I never quite get the words I want out. However the team behind the film are amazing and couldn’t be more supportive and they have done an amazing job of making sense of my ramblings and helping me get my message across.

So despite my instinctive reluctance I shall continue to say yes, rather than no, when asked to share my experience of melanoma. I really do hope that my message made some difference to the GPs today and like with many of the things that I’ve been asked to talk about it turns out that my ‘cancer journey’ has me quite opinionated. There’s nothing quite like experiencing the highs and lows of treatment, scans, progression and all the fear that comes with it to make you quite passionate at getting your voice heard.

 

 

 

Happy and sad

I planned to write a straightforwardly happy post today as yesterday’s scan news was good and amazingly my tumours remain stable, my bloods aren’t doing anything wild and other than the fatigue all is good with me. I am, as always, phenomenally relieved and woke up this morning feeling very happy and very lucky.

This all still stands – I am very lucky but sadly nothing makes that clearer than discovering, as I just did, that another of my friends from the hospital died early this morning. Back at the beginning of  2016, when I embarked on my second course of Ipi/Nivolumab, I met another patient who was 3 months ahead of me in terms of that particular treatment and so had completed the combo drugs and had moved onto the Nivolumab monotherapy. We both received our treatment on Mondays and so would often bump into each other and catch up at the hospital. At that time my situation seemed more worrying as I was on my second go at immunotherapy, my tumours were hanging around being sinister on and near my liver and there was no way of knowing whether the re-challenge would work. Her tumours weren’t on any of her organs but had taken up residence in her lymph nodes but they appeared to be slow growing and although were causing a degree of pain and a lot of discomfort they didn’t, at that time, represent such a threat.

Move forward a few months and I got the amazing news that the re-challenge had been successful and the tumours were smaller and eventually stabilised but she was not so lucky – her attempts to keep the disease under control lead to two years of difficult treatment, much stress and anxiety and eventually the news today that she had died.

I’m not writing this for sympathy that belongs to her husband, family and close friends but just as a reminder that life is incredibly fragile and life with cancer especially so. Sometimes being in the best place, with the best doctors and pursuing the best treatment proves to not be enough and sometimes this bastard of a disease behaves in utterly unpredictable ways.

So tonight I shall be lighting another candle and when I next go to the Marsden I shall do what I do on every visit and I shall think of the friends that I’ve met there who in the end were not as lucky and I shall be adding a new name to that ever growing list.

I really did want to write a happy post as somewhat ridiculously I don’t want my ‘cancer blog’ to be all gloom and doom and despite tonight’s sadness I am basically feeling very lucky and happy to know that all is currently stable and for now I’m safe but it doesn’t stop the sadness and the reality of the disease changing the narrative.

However, its January, its another whole new year, we’ve got a short break booked for half-term and I’m hoping to go to Brussels in March for the next MPNE conference so there’s good and fun stuff on the horizon. So when I go to sleep tonight that’s what I shall hold on to and I shall try and think of other stuff to add to the list in order that I make the very best of the lucky life I have.

Pre-scan nerves……again….

I’m sure I bore everyone stupid by going on about the pre-scan nerves but despite being used to the pattern of regular scans the absolute blinding terror is still capable of hitting me like a truck.

For the last two years I’ve tended to have my scan on a Monday and then my results the following Monday. This is one of the weirder changes since having had to move my care from the NHS to private in order to access the drugs – previously, under the NHS I’d have scan in the morning and my results the same afternoon!

Anyway, I’ve got used to this pattern but due to the Christmas holidays and trying to figure out timings of treatments etc this time round my scan is due this Thursday and I’ll be getting my results next Monday. I am totally aware that it’s only a week to results day and yet, because I’m still determinedly living in my Christmas bubble, I’d actually managed to not descend into fully pre-scan panic. Today I was taking advantage of Max’s super long Christmas holiday by having a day out with him and we were talking about something that was happening next Monday when it clicked that I’d be getting results that day. For a moment, I genuinely felt as though someone had dropped me from great height or thrown something very heavy at me. I felt a horrible combination of sick, faint and tearful – it was the most extraordinary physical reaction that left me momentarily speechless.

I obviously didn’t want to dump all this on Max so instead we swiftly moved on and I quickly recovered but the terror has officially descended…. It didn’t stop us having a really lovely day out together but it has reinforced my sense that over time the wait for scan results gets worse and worse every time.

Goodbye 2017….little bit scared about what comes next….

I realise that my poor blog gets pretty neglected when everything is fine. The urge to write, the urge to explain and to untangle the mess in my head is directly related to how all consuming my ‘adventure with melanoma’ is at the time. So when I go quiet and forget to post it’s generally because everything is ticking along pretty well and that’s certainly been the case for the last month or two. The good results of my last scan back in October have allowed me to just be as normal as I ever can be. The hospital appointments continue, the fatigue from Pembro continues but so does life and Christmas and the run up to Christmas has been very lovely. I baked and baked and baked throughout November and December and loved not just the baking but also the lists and the planning and the sense of purpose. It’s been a long time since working out a baking schedule interrupted my sleep rather than the paralysing fear about what the damn cancer was up to and it felt really normal and really good. As I’ve often said in this blog – normal is very underrated. I really miss it and on the occasions when I feel close to it again I’ve learnt to embrace and acknowledge it.

At the end of November I had my third trip to the MPNE workshop in Krusenberg, Sweden. The purpose of the workshop was to apply business models to patient advocacy and to develop strategies for lean advocacy. The work was really interesting and productive the hotel, as always was lovely – beautiful setting and seriously delicious food, but the best bit for me is the people. It was really lovely to see my friends and it just feels very right and very reassuring to be around other people who also live melanoma. They understand without needing to explain that being diagnosed with melanoma and particularly being diagnosed with stage IV melanoma is something you think about every minute of every day but being around other people in the same situation makes me feel totally normal and that’s a very good feeling.

As well as the baking and the trip to Sweden the last few weeks have also been filled with preparing for Christmas and I really do love it. I feel phenomenally lucky and grateful to be experiencing my 5^th Christmas after my stage IV diagnosis and having Andy and the boys around makes this time of year particularly special. We’ve managed to achieve a perfect balance of catching up with friends and lots of time, just the four of us, being lazy and hanging out together. It’s been a very perfect Christmas and it finished with a very perfect New Years Eve with good friends.

So despite today being January 1^st I’m determined to stay in the Christmas bubble until at least the 4th when Andy and Oscar return to work and school. January is not my favourite month at the best of times but this one will be throwing a scan my way in just a couple of weeks and that’s a pretty daunting way to start a new year. Once the scan is done and depending upon the results I need to make some plans as at the moment my diary is very clear and I feel quite frightened about what to expect from 2018. As always, I know how extraordinary it is that I’m here at the start of yet another ‘impossible’ year and I’m obviously extremely grateful but living in a permanent state of limbo is pretty challenging. So before I descend in to doom and January gloom instead I shall think about the whole load of lovely things that filled 2017 and how incredibly happy I am to have been there to experience them. A very happy and healthy 2018 to everyone.