april is the cruellest month...

... well, I hope not. In fact, in what I hope will be the obverse of TS Eliot's circumspect treatment of my birth month in his Waste Land, I can only be encouraged by the fact that this is my last full month of chemo (provided all goes well with the PET scan).

I've still retained a fair amount of my hair, but it's all prickly in many places all over my scalp now where my hair is down to just the ends. It's really odd and basically feels pretty uncomfortable when it rubs against anything - even my pillow.

Other side effects feel under control. I'd previously mentioned that I have a new drug called lanzoprozole, which has been highly effective in terms of keeping the indigestion in check.
I'm also finishing anti-nausea tabs today. In that regard, I actually haven't felt too horrific this time round... I hope the final three treatments are also like that.

So yeah, there we go. All in all, it's continuing to be a bit of a slog. Although I feel alright the vast majority of the time, I nonetheless have a persistent feeling of being a little frayed around the edges; a bit of constant fatigue that I find very difficult to shake - regardless of how early I climb into bed and however late I get up.

But I guess humans are adaptable, and you quickly familiarise yourself and accept the new conditions you live your life in. I guess I've adapted to my currently incredibly slow pace of life, with whole days lost without doing much except recovering. I've begun to forget about the active and outgoing life I used to have - it all seems so long ago I could go out without thinking about infection and being wary about that sneezing man on the tube. It seems so long ago I could go to the gym and then go to the pub with my friends afterwards. It all seems like such a distant, unattainable memory. Another life. I guess, someday, this one will seem equally distant and, probably, a little surreal to Future Super Healthy & Happy Tom.

As the weather improves, I'm more and more looking forward to this all being over - chemo is over 5 weeks as of Friday. As Mr Churchill said, "we must KBO":
Keep
Buggering
On
Well, not literally. But, metaphorically, I'm with you there, Winston. Super good advice.

Tom