So yesterday I finished cycle 12 of my FOLFOX chemotherapy and a nice nurse pulled my PICC line out. It's done, over, and I can have a shower without having to wear a blue plastic bag on my arm.
I haven't been blogging much as everything becare rather routine, a cycle of clinic - chemo - pump off - flush line and back to clinic again on a 2 week merry-go-round. The last couple of cycles have been, to be honest, really rough. The neuropathy is now constant and rather than a sharp cold feeling has become a dull numbness in the fingers and hands and a general soreness in the feet; I'm perpertually exhausted and can barely concentrate. Even watching the Great British Bake-Off is becoming a challenge and I can't work out whose sponge cake belongs to who*
But anyway the chemotherapy is over and that's a good thing. Yes? Well kinda, because apparently I found out this week that despite this bloody stuff poisoning you you also get withdrawal symptoms when you stop taking it and the neuropathy can get worse. Must have missed that part of the blurb when I signed the consent forms.
Of course the big question is "did it work". Well as you may have read earlier it was at least working on the liver metastices so the doctors were hopeful that it'll have carried on working. We find out in the next few days because on Monday I'm back in the donut of doom for a scan, the "multidisciplinary team"** meet on Thursday to read the runes and the goat entrails and the following Monday I get to hear if the man from hepatic surgery, he say yes, or no.
Stay tuned.
* apart from our hairy Irish proto-Gandalf of course - his is the one in the bin.
** one of them has a qualification in Uighur throat-singing, now that's multidisciplinary
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