Vita: Ten Chemo Tips

This time last year, I had just finished the last of six rounds of chemotherapy and was preparing for my first post-chemo Christmas. It’s hard to believe a whole year has gone by, particularly as I still remember the day I was ‘sentenced‘ to eight months of treatment as if it were yesterday.

Since then, I’ve met a lot of people going through chemo and I’ve been surprised at the varying advice given to them by different hospitals, for example the woman whose nails went black and started falling off after chemo because she had never been given a simple tip to help protect them.

With this in mind, I’ve written a list of ten top tips to get through chemo for this month’s post for Breast Cancer Care UK’s Vita magazine. Click the link to read the list.

Merry Christmas all!

Dublin in a Day, Back to Neutropenia and the End of the World

Phew! So yesterday I got back from an exhausting two-day tour of the UK and Ireland’s cancer hospitals.

It started with a 5am rise on Tuesday for my flight to Dublin with Mum, to meet the oncologist who’ll be looking after my radiotherapy treatment. By 9am I had trekked through two airports and endured a cramped Ryanair flight with a screaming, kicking child in the seat behind me, people coughing all around me and the constant intrusive din of Ryanair’s overhead advertising of refreshing J20, a selection of hot drinks and snacks and a very special, exclusive 2-for-1 scratch card deal. Let’s just say I understand why air travel is not recommend during chemotherapy treatment. It’s exhausting.

First up, I headed to work to see my colleagues and pick up my post before going to my hospital appointment. At 11:30, after greeting half of my department with a hug and being regaled with tales of how half of them had just got over the 24-hour vomiting bug that’s sweeping Britain and Ireland, I called my doctor for the results of Monday’s blood test and found out I was neutropenic again. My white blood cells and neutrophils had completely reversed their earlier gain and were so low that I had virtually no infection-fighting abilities and shouldn’t really be around anyone at all, let alone sitting on Ryanair flights and hugging germ-ridden workmates (no offense!). However, I was already in Dublin by that point and any damage had already been done, so the hospital said they’d test me when I got back to Manchester.

Next up, my appointment at St. Luke’s, a specialist cancer hospital in the leafy Dublin suburb of Rathgar. Now, for those of you who’ve been reading this blog since the beginning, you’ll know I was diagnosed at St. Vincent’s, which is a large hospital in Dublin, and I was expecting something similar. But as soon as we pulled up in the taxi outside St. Luke’s, I could see it was different. You can’t really tell from the photo to the left but it was more like a quaint old people’s home or an American chapel than a hospital – just one storey high and with a very friendly, intimate vibe. I loved it immediately. (Well, as much as it’s possible to love a hospital where you’re about to be blasted to pieces with radiation).

I walked up to reception and said “Hi, I’ve got an appointment with Dr McVey” and the response from the reception desk was a very hearty, smiley, “Ah, you must be Laura!”

Honestly, I have never felt so welcome (even at a hotel, never mind at a hospital!) It turns out I had been in touch with the friendly woman on reception via email, and when she saw me with my little wheelie suitcase she realised I was from out of town and put two and two together that I must be the young British girl coming over for radiotherapy. But still! What lovely people.

Unfortunately, after all that, it turns out I won’t be able to have my radiotherapy at St. Luke’s because they couldn’t fit me in on the public system so I have to go privately at St. Vincent’s instead, but that’s fine because it’s closer to work and my flat. I’ll write a separate post about my radiotherapy treatment plan because it’s too much information for this post, but basically I should start on 2nd Jan and finish at the end of February, with 33 radio sessions.

Flying Back to Manchester

On the flight home, with Aer Lingus this time, I was momentarily delighted when I saw that we were sitting in the emergency exit seats, i.e. plenty of leg room and as much space as possible away from my fellow passengers with their various vomiting bugs and winter flu. The delight was soon snatched away from me, though, when your lady from Aer Lingus looked at me, gestured towards the window I was sitting next to and said “You’re guarding the emergency exit there, are you willing and able to initiate an evacuation in an emergency?” (You see, I had taken off my wig by this point and was wearing a snazzy purple beanie and I obviously screamed “cancer patient/invalid” to her.)

I paused for a moment, recalling the opening scenes from series 1 of LOST. Was I really strong enough, after six rounds of chemo and one exhausting day of travel, to lift a 15kg aeroplane door off its hinges in a crash and lead my fellow passengers down the inflatable slide into the sea, making sure they all took off their heels so as not to puncture it?

“Yes,” I finally said. I was too exhausted to move and I really didn’t care that much about my fellow passengers anyway. (Apart from Mum, and I’d help her down the inflatable slide first anyway). Plus the evacuation procedure looked simple enough.

“Please ensure all electronic devices and mobile phones are switched off,” the cabin attendant said, eventually, preparing for take off.

“Oh NO!” Mum exclaimed from the seat next to me. She had left her mobile phone on, and the cabin lady had insisted we put our bags up in the overhead cabins so as not to block the emergency exit, and now we were all firmly belted in and ready for take-off. “What should I do?” she said, looking at me for answers.

I was in two minds. I knew Mum’s phone was unlikely to cause a crash during our 40-minute flight to Manchester, but I wanted to avoid any increased risk that I would have to get off my poor chemo-sapped arse and shuffle 100-odd passengers out of that emergency exit, so eventually we asked the cabin lady to get Mum’s bag down so she could switch her phone off.

The plane did not crash. We made it safely to Manchester. Then I got a paper cut from one of the items of my mail I’d picked up from the office. Will it ever end?!

Back to the Christie

Luckily, we had the good sense to stay overnight in Manchester on Tuesday, otherwise I don’t think I’d have even had enough strength to get myself back there on Wednesday (purely due to tiredness and still fighting this infection). I was in for my three-week post-chemo check-up, which truly marks the end of chemotherapy – hooray!

Because I was neutropenic on Monday, I went in for another blood test on Wednesday. Unfortunately, I was dehydrated from our overnight stay in a stuffy hotel room (I know people commit suicide sometimes but I really wish hotel rooms had openable windows…) and it took three painful attempts before the nurses could get blood from me. Yuck! Seriously, I must have had more than 100 needle injections so far in 2012.

Then followed a tense wait for my blood count results. If my white blood cells and neutrophils went down from Monday, I would have to be admitted as an inpatient and be hooked up to a drip again for a few days in hospital – possibly spending Christmas Day at the Christie Clinic. But if they went up, I would be allowed to go home. So you can only imagine how relieved I was when the doctor told me they’d gone up. Not exactly by much, but honestly, I couldn’t care less as long as I was able to go home.

Now please let me not have picked up any vomiting bugs in the past two days! (Not that it matters anyway, seeing as the world is going to end tomorrow…)

Is the Chemo Working?

Many of you have asked me whether my chemotherapy is working, which is a very good question.

Sometimes chemo is given to people before they have surgery, to reduce the size of the tumour and operate once it has shrunk. The doctors do scans routinely to see whether or not the tumour is shrinking, so it’s possible to see whether the chemo is doing its job.

In my case, my tumour was relatively small and my surgeon hero successfully removed the whole nasty thing in June. He also took some of the surrounding tissue and tested it for cancer cells, and this came back beautifully clear (which is why I declared myself footloose and cancer-free in early July). It was the best possible outcome and I got it.

My chemotherapy and radiotherapy, therefore, are entirely preventative. I am technically as cancer-free as the rest of you, but because I am young, I need to be blasted to bits with the strongest drugs and radiation just to make sure that if there is even one minuscule, evil little ‘C’ cell still hanging out somewhere inside me, it gets absolutely obliterated and never, ever, EVER has the chance to grow and multiply and make friends with other little nasty ‘C’s to form a tumour again.

Because my chemo and radiotherapy are only preventative, there is no need to do any tests or scans to see if it’s ‘working,’ according to my oncologist. Giving me scans to check for anything at the moment would expose me unnecessarily to further radiation, so there will be no scans for the foreseeable (although I may have to have one before radiotherapy, to decide where the radiation will be given).

So, the answer to the title question is “we hope so!”  It’s basically a case of trusting the statistics and assuming that subjecting my body to all this short-term poison is doing me some long-term good… Here’s hoping!

In other news, I still have a very croaky, husky voice and a horrible cough and cold (along with half the nation) and am on the antibiotics and going for another blood test tomorrow (when will the needles stop?!) But the good news is my hair still seems to be growing nicely in random patches and there has even been a vague glimpse of some sideburns. I never thought I’d be so happy to see those big, dark sideburns again!

“Psychological” Problems

Friday turned out to be rather stressful. Having had a higher-than-normal temperature for almost a week, I had been to the doctors for a full blood count test, to check if everything was in order before I headed to London for my nutritionist appointment (of which, more in a later post). Of course, when I called for my results, the receptionist told me to call back at 11:30am, which was precisely the time my train set off for London.

When I was admitted to hospital with a high temperature a few weeks ago, I had a condition called neutropenia, where I had an abnormally low number of white blood cells called neutrophils. While I was neutropenic, anyone who entered my hospital bedroom had to wear rubber aprons and gloves so as not to spread their germs, because an infection can quickly become life-threatening for chemotherapy patients. My neutrophil and white blood cell levels at the time were something like 0.5 (i.e. extremely low).

Naturally, I was concerned on Friday that my GP would call back and tell me I was neutropenic again, and I’d have to abort my lovely first-class train journey with my mother and pay £100+ to jump on the next train back home, forfeiting my nutritionist appointment and weekend plans. So imagine my surprise when the good doctor called back and told me my white blood cells and neutrophils were at 39.7 and 34.9 respectively!

These abnormally high levels, he said, indicated that I must have an active infection but that my immune system (for once!) was fighting it extremely well, producing more white blood cells to kill the nasties. Of course, the daily injections I’ve been having are to boost my immune system and the blood test was taken on day eight of the daily injections, so there was every chance my counts were artificially high because of those shots.

Slightly alarmed, I called the hospital to ask them what to do. Did I need to get the next train to the hospital in Manchester because I had an infection? Or was I fine to continue with my plans because my body was fighting it effectively? I felt absolutely fine in myself, apart from the slightly worrying temperature, nose bleeds, hot flushes, tiredness and other usual chemo side effects.

I managed to get all the way to London, do my final self-injection in the loo of a Vauxhall Pret a Manger café and have my 1.5-hour nutritionist appointment before I got a definitive response from the hospital: I was absolutely fine. The abnormally high white blood count was a natural response to the daily shots and my immune system was behaving exactly as it ought to. I still to this day don’t know whether I had an infection or not, but I have at least stopped worrying about it.

I didn’t manage to perform a jig after my last self-injection because I was still too stressed at that point. My left eye has also been twitching sporadically for the past few days, something that happens when I am stressed. A quick straw poll revealed that a twitchy eye is a Price-family-wide problem. (Good to know it’s not just a side effect of the leftover eyelash glue.) I went to a doctor about it many years ago and was told it was “psychological”. I had saved up four different problems for that particular doctors visit as I didn’t think it sufficient to take two hours off work to ask about a twitchy eye alone, and the very unhelpful GP kindly declared every single one of my ailments as “psychological”. So that told me!

I do feel bad going to the doctor and being told there’s nothing wrong with me. I am a constant guilt sufferer. They tell you to report everything from high temperatures to sore veins to stomach pains, but then you do so and find out there’s nothing wrong and you start feeling like a hypochondriac time-waster. But, as with the lump in my breast that I decided to seek a second opinion on, it’s always better to be safe than sorry.

I finally got back from London late last night after spending Monday catching up with different friends, among whom a 9-months-and-one-week pregnant lady and a friend hobbling around on crutches after breaking her toes surfing. When I went to bed at 8pm on Sunday night and slept until 9am Monday morning because I was so shattered, I never imagined I’d be the fittest and most able-bodied of my friends come Monday afternoon!

The good news is the hot flushes seem to have finally stopped, which means I can rule out the menopause and blame it all on the steroids. I may have had a wee glass of champagne with my hotdog on Saturday night to celebrate (as you do).

Faking It (and Failing)

Dear inventor of make-up and wigs,

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I don’t know what I’d do without you. (See photo)

From Laura Hetty Price, aged 30 years, 4 months and 4 days 

(3 months and 6 days of which bald as a baby)

Right, that’s it – I give up on fake eyelashes. They are officially the devil’s work.

So yesterday, I had my interview with the Huddersfield Examiner. The photographer and journalist were coming to my house, so I wanted to look nice for my first local newspaper appearance since my 2004 hotpant-clad debut. As you can see by the above photo, my “Before” look is pretty dire now that I’m at the very end of my chemo treatment. Despite the fact that I still have at least 50 eyelashes and 50 eyebrows (I haven’t actually counted – that’s a guesstimate), you would hardly know it to look at me. Add to that the fact that I seem to be going through a rosy-cheeked hot flush in the above photo, and you’ll probably agree you wouldn’t want to appear in a newspaper in front of all your old school friends looking like that either. So, naturally, I wanted to put on some false eyelashes to try and recapture a little of my former dazzle.

Now, two years ago, when I was young and carefree and dabbled for the first time in fakies, I was an absolute natural. Under the careful supervision of my housemate Beth, I applied the glue (gentlemen, be not afraid) to the edges of the falsies, waited 30 seconds or so while waving the lashes about a bit to gain flexibility, then simply looked down and pressed the lashes onto the top of my own ones and held for a while until the glue took hold. Simples, as those meer cats on the telly would say.

Flash forward to 2012, my lashes a shadow of their lengthy, luscious former selves, and things were not so simple. After thirty minutes of grappling with Boots No 7’s finest lashes, Cheryl Cole’s signature collection, some professional Shu Uemera lash glue and a load of sticky, black mess, I still could not attach a single one of the fakies firmly to my own limp, ailing eye hairs and I collapsed into a frustrated tizzy. (It is not often that I get into a tizzy, dear reader, but you can be assured that my lack of experience and expertise in the area of make-up and hair is one of the few things almost guaranteed to cause me bother whenever I step out of my comfort zone.)

The glue used in the fake eyelash industry, I am convinced, is made of exactly the same stuff as the adhesive in the bandages used to protect my breast and armpit scars after my surgery. Those of you who have been reading this blog since the beginning will have no problem casting your minds back to July, when I complained about the difficulty I was having removing said adhesive from my breast and armpit, resulting in unfortunate stickage of a) my clothes to my skin and b) my arm to the side of my body. I am now, it seems, having similar problems with the eyelash glue, whereby after several applications of three different types of glue to my eyelids yesterday, my eyes and lashes are now sticking together. This does not bode well for the preservation of the remaining 50 or so eyelashes I do still possess…

Anyway, needless to say, my relationship with the fake eyelash industry is well and truly over and I will just have to hope that the aforementioned stragglers do pull through to 2013 and beyond. For those interested, I have also looked into permanent eyelash extensions, but it seems that as these are attached lash-for-lash to the eyelashes you already have, it isn’t really the ideal option for me. I don’t want to lengthen the ones I’ve got, but thicken them and add new ones. There may be a gap in the beauty market for that particular product.

(Wow, I honestly I had no idea I was even capable of writing so much on the subject of fake eyelashes…)

So, after that digression, I put normal make-up on (see the “After” pic at the top) and did the interview with the lovely lady from the Examiner. The chap came round and took a few photos of me, and I did a few with wig off and a few with wig on (Samantha). I didn’t like any of them, and have decided I’m going to stop this posing-wigless nonsense from now on because I am never pleased with any photos that don’t come from my own iPhone, so that’s that. I’m not sure exactly when the interview will appear in the paper but I will of course keep you posted. I now have a national newspaper on my trail too so I’m one step closer in my quest for world domination.

On the health side of things, my temperature has remained higher than normal for almost four days and I’ve been coughing too, so I went to see my doctor yesterday. He did a bit of a health assessment and confirmed my chest is clear, which is excellent news. I don’t have any visible infections but am still concerned because I’m going to London tomorrow to see the nutritionist and the last thing I want is a temperature spike when I’m 200+ miles away from my usual hospital. So I went for a blood test this morning (amazingly, the needle went in and drew blood first time – happy days) and will hopefully find out by tomorrow just how dangerously low my white blood cells are this time…

I just did my 49th daily injection of Filgrastim and will possibly do a little dance at the nutritionist’s office tomorrow afternoon when I celebrate my 50th (AND LAST EVER, hopefully).

I’ll leave you with a couple of pics of the first winter snow in my beautiful native Shepley yesterday. 

Unfortunately, the paltry amount of snow we received has melted and it’s now lashing with rain and bitter winds outside. Delightful.

Time Goes By… So Slowly

Time goes slowly when you’re not having fun, I can confirm.

And at certain points during chemotherapy, it is as if time has stopped entirely, and life is going on around you while yours is completely stopped, and all you can do is lie in bed and stare into space. I’ve had days like this in every round of chemo, and it kicked in again last weekend. It’s just like when you spend a Saturday night in by yourself looking at everyone else having fun on your Facebook feed (which I do all the time), only times the feeling by a few thousand! Quite depressing.

It took about four days before the effects of the final Taxotere really kicked in, and over the weekend I started to feel all the usual tiredness, lethargy, aching, prickling pains, sore mouth, coated tongue, horrible taste in my mouth and a general feeling of being just not right – you can’t really put your finger on it, but it really makes you quite miserable. I have been having the worst hot flushes all week, but am reasonably convinced that they’re due to the steroids and chemo drugs and not the actual menopause. It’s a bit tricky to get cool during a hot flush when you have two heavy cats sitting on top of a duvet on your lap though!

I have also been able to feel my veins pulsing and twitching for the past week – fortunately it seems to have stopped today, but it’s rather weird, as if I can feel the drugs going up and down my veins. The nurses have showed me how to massage my damaged veins and I’m trying to do some stretching exercises as I realise my muscles and joints are totally tight at the minute and not used to so much inactivity. You don’t realise how much your body will change during chemo treatment, but I feel like it has aged my body by about 30 years. Assuming radiotherapy doesn’t hit me too badly, I hope I can start jogging gently in January and get back to a good level of fitness within a few months.

I have had an elevated temperature for the past 32 hours or so – not quite high enough to go to hospital, but much higher than normal, which is worrying. I am checking my temperature every hour and dreading the moment I see 37.7 and know I have to go back to the hospital to be put back on the drip… After six rounds of chemo, my immune system is at its lowest ever, and the feeling of wanting to get past this stage and out of the danger zone couldn’t be stronger.

I haven’t taken pictures of anything other than cats for the past week at home, but my Mum pointed out that there was a patch of hair growing on the back of my head, so I asked her to take a picture. The photo on the left is from the day of my last chemo and the very ugly back-of-my-head photo on the right is from yesterday. I was quite surprised how much hair there was, and it seems a lot of it is recent growth, which makes me think my hair has already started growing back. It will probably still fall out a bit in the next couple of weeks though and start growing again, and apparently I’m likely to get ‘baby hair’ before I get real hair (I think the stuff I have at the moment is baby hair – it’s extremely soft!)

The nurse said it should start growing back one month after the last chemo, so that’s Christmas Day – something to look forward to!

Chemotherapy: Round Six

Yes, I really did wear my birthday bunny onesie to the hospital yesterday. It had to be done, given Monday’s good news re: the BRCA gene result and then the fact that it was my final chemo session. And guess what? Not a single person commented! A few people looked me up and down with amused faces, but not even the oncologist batted an eyelid when I turned around to leave his office, revealing my white bunny tail! (Pippa Middleton, eat your heart out). Well, these people have clearly seen it all.

(That’s mother in the background beavering away relentlessly at her work – she never ceases.)

The day in hospital took a little longer than usual, but the chemo itself flew by. Nurse Alison was one of the best I’ve had yet and she managed to get the needle and cannula into my hand with the minimum of fuss, effort and pain, much to my relief. The ice torture wasn’t even as bad this time – I swear the gloves were warmer, or maybe I’m just getting used to it. There was a period of about 15 minutes with the second pair of fresh ice gloves when my hand was completely numb and I thought it was going to drop off, but the fact that I knew it was my final chemo made it all easier to bear.

The good news is the oncologist agreed with the geneticist that I don’t need to have the mastectomy operation. The combination of surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and five years of Tamoxifen on my left breast is the equivalent of having a mastectomy, he said. Of course, there is much more of a risk of getting breast cancer on my right-hand side at some point, but if this happened, I could have the same treatment of surgery, chemo and radio again (God forbid this never, ever happens). And if I get a recurrence on my left side, I’d have to have a mastectomy then. He said the double mastectomy and reconstruction at this stage would be such a huge and fairly risky operation that my situation doesn’t merit taking the risk, so I shall now cast all doubts from my mind and concentrate on getting back to my life – a very, very happy day!

My blood count yesterday, even after two days of steroids to boost it, was still almost too low to have chemo, and the oncologist had decided that my infection and high temperature a couple of weeks ago were the effects of the chemo, so he has given me more steroids to take for the next few days, plus some other drugs to offset the side effects of the steroids, so this is the grand total of what I’m on at the moment:

– The Taxotere chemo itself

– Dexamethasone steroids (I’m in hot-flush heaven right now…)

– Once-a-day injection of Filgrastim for 10 days to boost my bone marrow/immune system

– Lansoprazole to offset steroid side effects

– Senokot to ward off the constipation

– A healthy cocktail of Co-Enzyme Q-10 and multivitamins

– Aspirins in a few days’ time when the pain sets in

– Tamoxifen starting in three weeks for five years!

Uff! That’s definitely the most drugs I’ve ever taken, I’d say!

So, the next steps… well, it’s not over yet. I have to go back to see the oncologist in 3 weeks for a check up. No doubt my blood count will be very low by then as it’s never recovered properly and I won’t be taking the steroids any more, but fingers crossed there’ll be no infections this time. Then I start taking Tamoxifen, the drug to reduce my oestrogen levels for five years, and in 3 weeks I also go to Dublin to meet the radiotherapy team.

Then, fingers crossed, radiotherapy in January and February, then back to see the surgeon in March, back to see the oncologist in June and so on and so forth returning to the hospital for the rest of my life!

I confess I had a bit of a sugar binge last night because I really felt the need for sugar and thought, if you can’t have some Haagen Dazs ice cream, ginger ale and prawn cocktail crisps on your final day of chemo, when can you have some Haagen Dazs ice cream, ginger ale and prawn cocktail crisps?! Plus, the oncologist is absolutely adamant that what I eat has nothing to do with my cancer so if it were left to him, I could just continue as normal. But I’ll give all those nutritionists the benefit of the doubt and continue with my healthy eating from now on…

Finally, thanks to Kimm and Howard, who sent me these gorgeous flowers about 20 minutes after I got my gene test result on Monday. Beautiful!

Now it’s off to rest for a few days… This bunny is DONE with chemo!

Losing My Lashes

It has been almost three months since I lost my full head of hair, so I suppose I should count myself lucky my eyebrows and lashes have lasted this long. For some reason I had barely noticed, but my lashes and brows have been falling out thick and fast for a month or so, possibly because of the Taxotere chemotherapy.

I used to curse the big bushy caterpillar brows I inherited from my Dad, but these days I’m very grateful as they’ve seen me through five rounds of chemo! My lashes are now much thinner and have gaps in between them and my brows are much, much thinner. However, the crazy Mancunian man who tried to sell me a wig three months ago told me very matter-of-factly that I would lose ALL my eyelashes and brows, so in your face Mr. Scissorhands!

I consider myself lucky that all my hair loss has been very gradual. Whereas I expected it to fall out in huge clumps after one week, it actually fell out in tiny clumps after three weeks and gradually thinned over the course of a week or so. And whereas I expected to lose my lashes and brows quickly and entirely, they have in fact just come out very gradually, one lash or brow at a time, over the course of three and a half months. I can live with that.

The first photo shows my lashes and brows as they were pre-cancer in May (back when I had head hair as well – I can barely remember what it felt like!) As you can tell by the colour of my skin in these photos, the first photo has been filtered on Instagram and I’m also wearing eyeliner as well as mascara, so it’s not exactly a fair comparison, but unfortunately I didn’t think to take ‘before’ photos sans make-up several months ago!

The second photo is me, today, without any make-up. You can’t really tell that well from the photo, but not only are my eyebrows much thinner, my eyelashes are also quite limp and weak-looking. Very ‘meh’…

Fortunately, a fellow cancer-fighting young lady suggested I buy Browzings eyebrow make-up from Benefit to fill in my brows, and I am quite pleased with the result. The only thing is I often run my fingers through my brows and am not used to having make-up there and am thus liable to smear it all over my face, so if you do see me with dark smears around my temples, please let me know.

In the below photo, I’ve conveniently left one eye sans make-up and one eye done with a bit of mascara and some Browzings, for your perusal. I’ll try and remember to do both eyes when I go out, obviously…

Here’s the finished result with both eyes done. (Still no eyeliner, sorry Beth, I’m just rubbish at it…)

There’s only one more chemo session to go and my hair will keep falling out until about 3 weeks after the last session (so roughly until Christmas) so there’s a chance I could be bald-faced by year-end. But fingers crossed the little stragglers keep hanging on so I can make a nice dark-haired comeback in 2013!

Disclaimer: Before we start with the usual argument, I’m just going to put it out there that my eyes are green, not blue. Thanks 🙂

Braving the Bald Look

After spending the previous weekend quarantined in my little hospital room and attached to a drip, it was like the best thing ever to be able to spend last Saturday and Sunday in London, relishing in the joys of freedom and 360-degree arm movement.

I had planned the trip to London for my friend Karen’s birthday lunch, but a few days earlier I was invited to take part in a mini-photo shoot for the Stylist magazine 2012 census – a form I delighted in filling in with my cat on one of my many bed-ridden sick days recovering from chemo. My photo was to appear in tiny version alongside many others in an upcoming issue of the magazine, so I decided I would go wigless for the following reasons:

a) to be a bit brave and unashamed of my bald head

b) to be 100% myself

c) to be a little bit original

I had planned to wear earrings and false eyelashes to accentuate my better features and distract from my bald head because my eyebrows and lashes are now wearing thin (more of this in a later blog post). However, I forgot to pack the fakies and, unfortunately, every single chemist and supermarket around the Holborn area was shut on Sunday morning. And so it was that my friend Sophie and I rocked up to Stylist magazine HQ false eyelash-less and au naturel.

Unfortunately, the Stylist photo booth didn’t take such flattering photos as my iPhone, I felt really self-conscious and hated the final result, but it was a great experience all the same and I’m glad Sophie came along to support me in braving the Sinead look! You’ll have to wait til the magazine comes out to see my individual photo but here are the fun shots of Sophie and I for the time being. (Apologies that it’s a photo of a photo but scanning it would require getting out of bed.)

Sunday afternoon I had a wonderful time catching up with old colleagues and friends at Karen’s birthday lunch and very much enjoyed my lamb roast at The Brownswood in Finsbury Park, before catching the train back up North and sleeping for more than 12 hours, such was my exhaustion from the weekend.

Saturday was spent mostly eating my way around London with my old housemate Beth, who almost succeeded in giving up sugar with me for two weeks, but for a few momentary lapses. Our gastronomic tour began at the Mexican restaurant Wahaca in Covent Garden, with tacos, quesadillas and Mexican soup. Unfortunately one of the things I am most craving is ceviche and sashimi but the chemotherapy means raw fish is forbidden, so I had to make do with the cooked stuff.

In the evening, for want of a better film to see, we ended up watching The Sapphires, which was amusing and entertaining, though far from being one of the best films I’ve ever seen. After two weeks on a no-sugar diet, I am still surprisingly not craving sweet things at all, but I can never resist having sweet popcorn at the cinema.  We were also offered a free dessert at Wahaca and you’d have to be a fool to turn down a free dulce de leche pancake, right?

Finally, we tried to go to Bubbledogs, the new hotdog-and-champagne place, but the queue was too long and I was too tired to wait by this point so we ended up at Roka, a Japanese restaurant on Charlotte Street that reminded us of La Huella in Uruguay, where we’d been together in February. It was a shame my rice and asparagus came 10 minutes before my seabass main course but, other than that, I couldn’t fault it and will definitely be going back to try the black cod.

I’m safely back up North now for another week of resting and a hospital visit on Thursday before THE FINAL CHEMO next week.

The Big Sugar Challenge: Day 14

Well, would you Adam and Eve it? A whole two weeks have passed since I decided to give up sugar. I know it may not seem like it because I stopped posting my daily consumption after I had my last chemo, but today is in fact the last day. As of tomorrow morning, I can eat chocolate again – yay!

So how did it go? Well, besides being rushed to hospital for a few days, the no-sugar diet itself went just fine. The chemotherapy had already altered my tastes and meant that I’ve been eating strangely for the past few months anyway, so the shock to my system wasn’t as great as it would have been. I have definitely wanted to eat sweet things, but funnily enough with the withdrawal of hard chocolate, I’ve been left desperate for the simplest and actually quite healthy things – for instance I would kill for a dark-chocolate-covered rice cake, and I almost cried last week when I could only eat the raisins out of my Graze box but had to leave these chocolate-covered apricots. I mean, apricots, for God’s sake! I don’t even like them that much! But they’re still sitting here, ready to be eaten tomorrow.

I haven’t especially noticed any effects – whether good or bad – of giving up the white stuff, but that is probably mainly because of the chemo. I have had lots of headaches, but again, probably the chemo. And I can’t say I am brimming with energy but that’s also most likely because I’m still on really strong antibiotics and and the after-effects of the chemo.

My Mum, on the other hand, was probably a better guinea pig for this experiment and I could tell she felt miserable a few times not being able to have chocolate. She also had a lull around day five or so where I thought she didn’t have any energy and was fed up having to eat bananas and nuts all the time. So, cutting out chocolate can also make you a bit miserable. (We didn’t really have to do this experiment for two weeks though really, did we?) My Dad is also doing the diet and for some strange reason it barely seems to have affected him. I’m not sure whether he’s secretly sneaking in loads of cakes, but I do know he had a can of lemonade when I went to hospital because he was worried about me. (We let him off).

The outcome of all this is that I still believe all the hype about how bad sugar is for us and how it’s one of the causes of cancer, so I’m definitely cutting down on it long-term. Though I believe going completely cold-turkey can make you much more tempted to eat sugar, so I’ll be allowing myself small amounts from now on.

Here’s the report on the minor cheating incidents:

1 glass of apple juice at home because Mum forced me to drink it (it would’ve been wasted otherwise)

1 glass of orange juice in the hospital because it was the only thing that could quench my thirst after the first night in the most stuffy, tropical room with a 38.6-degree temperature

Quarter of a tin of beans on my jacket potato in hospital out of sheer deperation

Clandestine sugar sprinkled on my porridge by the hospital

1 cup of Horlicks in hospital to try and help me sleep/get rid of the yucky chemo taste in my mouth

That’s it. I swear. I am too honest, really I am. No chocolate, no sweets, no packet food, no crisps, no hot chocolate, nada.

In case you have nothing else to do of a Thursday afternoon, here’s the list of stuff I ate for the last two weeks – some of it has been forgotten as I wasn’t writing it down every day but you get the rough idea. I think I ate an unhealthy amount of nuts to replace the chocolate…

DAY SIX (Wednesday)

6am pre-breakfast: A banana and four steroids.

9:30am actual breakfast: Porridge with blueberries, nuts, cinnamon and a cup of tea.

Lunch: Bowl of homemade cauliflower and almond soup with one slice of grain bread and butter. A flat white coffee.

Snacks: One cup of tea.

Dinner: Lamb chops, veg, mashed potato with an actual sprig of mint in it because I didn’t think I was allowed mint sauce.

Now that’s commitment! Bowl of strawberries, blueberries and raspberries and Greek-style yoghurt. Mint tea.

DAY SEVEN (Thursday)

Breakfast: Porridge and banana, one tea.

Snacks: One flat white coffee.

Lunch: Two boiled eggs on toast with some salad. A fruit tea.

Snacks: A punnet of black-pepper pistachios and one of savoury biscuits/cracker snacks. Ginger-lemon tea.

Dinner: Fish, potatoes, veg, 1 slice of bread. Several pancakes with fruit, cinnamon, lemon and Greek-style yoghurt. One tea

DAY EIGHT (Friday)

Breakfast: One slice of brown toast and Marmite. One tea.

Lunch: Minestrone and bacon soup with one slice of bread.

Snacks: A load of seeds and raisins and one green tea.

Dinner: Mushroom and bacon pizza with salad. One banana with Greek-style yoghurt. One tea.

Then I got rushed into hospital… And stopped taking track of what I ate quite so much.

DAY NINE (Saturday) – in hospital

Several hours and litres of saline through a drip.

Breakfast: A bit of porridge and banana and some mandarin segments. A cup of tea. A clandestine half-glass of orange juice.

Lunch: Half a tuna sandwich and a bowl of fruit.

Dinner: Jacket potato with cheese. More fruit.

Snacks: Cup of hot milk.

DAY TEN (Sunday) – in hospital

Several more hours and litres of saline.

Breakfast: Full bowl of porridge with clandestine sugar. Bowl of mandarin segments.

Lunch: Cod mornay with rice and broccoli. Bowl of fruit.

Dinner: Pasta with tomato sauce. And a cheese board.

Snacks: Half a bag of pistachio nuts, unsalted, and some more nuts and raisins. One cup of hot milk, one clandestine cup of Horlicks.

DAY ELEVEN (Monday) – in hospital

Loads more saline.

Breakfast: Full bowl of porridge with clandestine sugar. Bowl of mandarin segments.

Lunch: Some toast with chicken and bacon and a jacket potato with cheese and some clandestine beans. Bowl of fruit.

Dinner: Chicken in white wine sauce with rice and veg. Another cheese board.

DAY TWELVE (Tuesday) – in hospital

Breakfast: A slice of brown toast and butter and a bowl of porridge with a banana. Cup of tea.

Lunch: Beef bourginon with rice and sweetcorn and a bowl of fruit. Cup of tea.

Snacks: Flat white coffee.

Dinner: Chicken and mushroom pie, chips and peas.

DAY THIRTEEN (Wednesday) – back at home

Breakfast: Bacon sandwich with brown bread and fresh tomato. Cup of tea.

Snacks: Flat white coffee.

Lunch: Tomato and basil soup.

Snacks: Nuts and raisins.

Dinner: Fish, potatoes, veg. Mint tea.

DAY FOURTEEN (Today!)

Breakfast: One slice of brown toast with Marmite. One cup of tea.

Lunch: One boiled egg, one pitta bread, houmous, salad, balsamic vinegar, salmon.

Snacks and dinner: Nothing as yet, but I promise I won’t eat any sugar!

 

Has anyone else managed to do two weeks? Or almost two weeks? How’d you get on?