Stem Cell Transplant Journal Day 5 – 5 December 2015 (Cancer and Me 46)
It’s Saturday today. Chemo-wise it’s exactly the same as yesterday, so I won’t bore you with it. The mild nausea comes and goes, and I mainly feel fine. I slept ok last night. Ironically the thing that kept me awake, if anything, was the fact that nobody woke me up to do ‘obs’! I was…
Stem Cell Transplant Journal Day 4 – 4 December 2015 (Cancer and Me 45)
My sleep last night was even worse than the previous night. I can’t really understand it. The bed is comfortable, the room is fairly quiet, the nurses are not intrusive. I wonder if it’s just psychological, knowing that I’ll be woken at 2am and 6am and so I’m kept awake waiting for it to happen?…
Stem Cell Transplant Journal Day 3 – 3 December 2015 (Cancer and Me 44)
My sleep last night wasn’t great, but not terrible. The nurse was very quiet coming in to do my obs (temperature, pulse and blood pressure) at 2:45am and then again at 6:15am. The main thing that disturbed my sleep was that I kept waking up panicking that I’d forgotten what I was supposed to be…
Stem Cell Transplant Journal Day 2 – 2 December 2015 (Cancer and Me 43)
I slept ok on and off on the first night. It was pretty quiet, thankfully. And the nurses decided not to do their normal 4-hourly observations since I’d come in so late. Normally they do ‘obs’ at 2am and 6am, so I’ve got that to look forward tonight. But last night they let me sleep…
Stem Cell Transplant Journal Day 1 – 1 December 2015 (Cancer and Me 42)
It’s been really busy since finding out that the stem cell transplant was coming up soon. I’ve tried to do most of the Christmas shopping, put the Christmas decorations up at home, arranged some financial assistance (the Chartered Accountants Benevolent Association again), done some shopping for bits I need for hospital, and caught up on…
The Stem Cell Transplant is On – 17 November 2015 (Cancer and Me 41)
Yesterday I went for my appointment at the Southampton Hospital Oncology department. I met with one of the senior doctors and the transplant co-ordinator, the same people I met back at the beginning of 2013 when my stem cells were harvested. He seems to be a doctor who likes to describe the various options, even…
PET CT Scan – 6 November 2015 (Cancer and Me 40)
If a doctor promises you an appointment or a date for some tests and then you don’t hear anything it’s best to chase it up! I hadn’t heard a thing about the PET CT scan appointment more than week after the doctor had said he was going to arrange it for “next week”. So I…
Scan Results so What’s next? – 28 October 2015 (Cancer and Me 39)
I prematurely wrote the title of this post before my appointment with the Haematology doctor today. I called it, “Stem Cell Transplant is Confirmed”. But it turns out that after the CT scan results there’s a couple more hoops to go through before we get to that point, so I’ve changed it! The CT scan…
27 October 2015 – Another treatment milestone (Cancer and Me 38)
It’s two months since I last wrote. What’s been happening? I had the third cycle of Bendamustine a few weeks ago – the 16th lot of chemo in my life. That’s my 28th lot of drug treatment if you include the Rituximab maintenance. I had my 10th CT scan a couple of weeks ago. And…
28 August 2015 – Burnt toast, nausea, shaky hands and anxiety (Cancer and Me 37)
Very soon it will be time for the second lot of chemo in this third lot of treatment. Time to review how things have gone over the past four weeks. My feeling about it would be: not as well as I’d hoped. But whilst that is true, I haven’t had to take much time off…