The last weekend before treatment

On Friday night I got my letter. It's the letter from the haematologist to the GP which explains what's happened to me, and it does so in cold, clinical detail.

The CT scan, it said, confirmed nodes ranging from 2.3cm in diameter in my neck to enlarged nodes up to 4cm (!) in diameter in my chest. However, there was no evidence of the disease below the diaphragm.

All in all, it says, I have features of "classical Hodgkin lymphoma, nodular sclerosis subtype". Okay. Deep breaths.

Now, of course, I already knew all this. I'd been told it and it had percolated around in my head a lot. But seeing it in black and white somehow brought it all home, made it more real somehow. My diagnosis didn't exist in the ether of speech any longer, but was documented, recorded and real.

I'm really lucky my cousin was here, otherwise I think I would have broken down. But I'm so lucky I have people like him, playing through an awful game of FIFA with me and talking about random nonsense to help the rawness siphon off a little bit.

After that I had a nice weekend, motivated by trying to move my headspace away from cancer as far as possible. And it went rather well actually. The last one pre-treatment and pre-hardcore chems pumping through my veins for a little while. But the last one of being an untreated patient and one before I started to get better.

At the risk of repeating myself from the last post - most of these have been in similar territory - I'm really trying to focus on the treatment now, how I'll react to it, and how I'll come through it. It's the first step to the light at the end of the tunnel - there will be some more moments like the one I describe above, I'm sure, but I'm sure too there will be happiness and hope. Just like normal life, only without the c-word looming over everything I do and plan to do. I guess I'm seeing it at the moment as a frustration rather than a source of fear - just f*** off so I can get on with my life, I often think.
Can't decide whether that's healthy or not... but I'd guess it probably is!

Anyway, this week I have to go to fertility tomorrow and then go to have my lungs tested before treatment, too, because one of the drugs in ABVD - think it's the B - can cause fibrosis of the lungs, meaning they want a baseline in case I get a bit breathless. Shouldn't be too bad.

And Friday is treatment 1/8.

Obviously, I'll write about how it all goes, alongside perhaps some other useless musings about how I'm doing.

T