About Me

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I'm Carole, living in London, happily married and mum to two amazing boys.I was diagnosed with Stage 3 Rectal Cancer in April 2010. Surgery took place in November 2010 and I now have a permanent colostomy...Spinal mets were then diagnosed in October 2011...In January 2012 I was told of further spread to the hip area (multiple lesions)..My life expectancy is now 6-9 months. Walk alongside me on the last part of my experience with this..

Monday 28 June 2010

Muddled through somehow.....

The weekend was spent trying to ignore the stingy pain (which makes it sound like a mild discomfort and I can assure you it's definitely not)... and distract myself as much as possible.
I was optimistic that without having the daily Radiotherapy sessions my poor sore bum would feel so much improved....sadly that's not the case.

Last night I laid in bed, had a short cry and discussed with Rab whether I even want to continue with the sessions - when I first went to Kings back in April my surgeon asked numerous questions and the answer to all was 'No'...
Such as;
do you have pain when having a bowel movement - No
do you have constipation one day then diarrhoea the next - No
do you have the feeling that you've not emptied your bowels fully - No
do you have pencil thin, hard to pass stools - No
do you regularly pass mucus in your stools - No
do you have discomfort in the anal area after a bowel motion - No
do you feel your bowels are blocked or restricted - No

NOW I can easily answer Yes to all the above......I thought treatment was supposed to make you better not worse :-(

Before all this 'treatment' started I had a sore bum that felt like piles and a small amount of bleeding after going to the loo - not an alarming amount just a bit after a movement - now I'm constantly wiping blood and mucus from a backside that stings to high heaven and literally drives me to tears and I'm wondering is this actually really helping me or not?

I asked the other day 'How do we know if the tumour is reducing in size, do I not have a scan half way or something to show us that it's starting to work?'...the answer was 'well, we don't know but we hope it's helping'.

So I then asked 'So how do we know that 25 sessions is what I actually need or is it just guess work?' *I can tell they're not happy at being questioned when they don't actually have the answers to hand*....
The answer was '25 sessions seems to be good for most people'...

to which I then said 'But if you don't scan half way through maybe people would only need 15 sessions or 20 sessions, isn't it a possibility that I'm receiving more Radiation than I actually need or want?'...

Anyway, I shall go for my appointment today - allow them to zap me again and see how I feel tomorrow. After today it'll be 9 more sessions to go.

I'd have liked this to have been a more positive update to my blog but if I said I feel great, soreness has gone, am coping really really well now it would just be a fairy story and not a true to life blog. I'll hopefully be feeling better by the next update.

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