Its working, but at a price.

Every couple of weeks the nice folk at the hospital extract a bit of blood from me. As time has gone on the PICC line has become increasingly uncooperative to this endeavor and today in order to get a dribble out if  it involved me coughing, standing up and taking deep breaths. I was beginning to wonder if jumping up and down on a hospital bed like in the Olympic games opening ceremony would be required.

The reason they need the blood is mainly to check that you're well enough for the next round of chemotherapy so they're looking at platelet counts and white blood cells. The other thing they do though is check for certain cancer markers in the blood, one of which is called CEA (which Professor Goole informs me is short for Carcinoembryonic Antigen). In healthy people the level is around 2.5 ng/ml and in your dragon at the start of treatment it was somewhere around the 300 mark indicating one seriously busy set of carcinomas.

Apparently according to my latest leakage into a test tube, I'm now down at 2, indicating that the bastard things aren't growing and we've put them to sleep.

Of course this being cancer it's swings and roundabouts and the wobbly-sit-on-horsey-mounted-on-a-spring in my playground is the fatigue. It's now pretty much constant throughout the 2 week treatment cycle whereas before it limited itself to when the 5FU pump was running and a day or two afterwards. Fatigue isn't like just being tired; sleep doesn't cure it and it messes with your head making concentration difficult and your thoughts as slow as wading through treacle.

"...It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed..." I could do with some of that

So anyway because of that I've stopped driving and I'm relying on the Mrs Dragon chauffeuring services.  I should probably get her one of those hats.