The elixir of youth
This is part of the cancer blogging series, which has an introduction.
Chemotherapy is the one where they poison you, rather than bombard you with radiotherapy. In my case it’s carboplatin. The way it works is that it interferes with the division of cells. A cancer is a growth of cells which are dividing uncontrollably, so it’s an excellent way to hit them. The downside is that carboplatin can hit any cells which divide. That’s not just in the cancer, but also in the bone marrow. That’s where your white blood cells which fit infection are formed, or not if you’re undergoing chemotherapy.
The process itself was fairly quick. I was treated over an hour after I was scheduled. I was told this was because of the lunch hour, but I wonder if they could have guessed there would have been a lunch hour between 12:00 and 13:30. Once I was in, it took around an hour hooked up to a bag of carboplatin with the needle going into a vein just below the thumb. That was new. I was warned about nausea, dizziness, headaches and so on. They weren’t too bad. What really hit me was insomnia. For the next week I was sleeping perhaps an hour or two each night. The other big problem has been breathlessness. Before chemotherapy I fixed my bike and tested it. Despite the operation I had no problem cycling for a couple of miles. After chemotherapy I couldn’t walk more than a hundred yards before feeling bad. On the plus side chemotherapy will take you back to your youth. The lack of white blood cells means that it’s really good for spots. I haven’t had so many for years.
It’s not just spots I have. I’ve also kept my hair. This seems to be the key interest amongst friends and that fact I have it seems disappointing. In the spirit of compromise I’ve had it shaved shorter. If I were female I think this would be a more sensitive issue, but if I were female, the chances of me getting testicular cancer would be quite a bit smaller.
In some ways the follow-up, three weeks after receiving the chemotherapy was a bit of an anti-climax. I went for a blood-test and got the results the next day. There’s no sign of cancer and there’s no problem with me driving. You’d think there’d be some sort of fanfare, possibly even a cake, but no. There’s just a series of appointments every three months for the next year with less regular visits for another four, just to be sure it’s not coming back.
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