The liver is a funny thing, for such a large organ it doesn't have very much in the way of pain receptors so when there's something up with it it rarely tells you directly but presses on other nerves so you get the ouchies elsewhere.
Mine's decided to go for the "you've just been kicked in the ribs by a shire horse" nerves and also the "you've overdone it on the sun lounger" ones so it feels like I've got a very localised form of sunburn in a roughly liver shaped area. Now hopefully once the chemo starts working the grouchettes in the liver will shrink and it'll stop being painful but for now I've had to step the pills up a notch to Tramadol which is on the lower rungs of the opiate drugs. Fortunately these don't have too many side effects and I'm sure the fluffy pink unicorns I keep seeing will go away shortly.
On top of that the chemo isn't exactly going smoothly either. The last lot of Oxaliplatin got the day unit all flustered because as soon as it went in my hands and face went bright red and my lips did a reasonable impression of Mick Jagger - cue much anti histamines and steroids being poured into your dragon and then spending the next few days flat on my back with fatigue. They've dropped the dose for this cycle but even so it's a bit itchy when it's going in.
Still I really can't complain as I'm still here and according to the statistics I shouldn't be. If you go back to the beginning of the blog you'll see that this week is my second "cancerversay" and when all this kicked off I was given a couple of years to live if the treatment worked. Sure we're in the last chance saloon as far as conventional treatment is concerned but we're still here and sticking two fingers up to the bastard.
