Saturday 19 May 2012

Tablets and Blood Tests.

I had written a list somewhere, of all the things that have happened lately and what needs blogging about, but would you believe, I’ve gone and lost the blooming thing. So now I am going to have a sit and think about what I wrote on that list.....hang on......In fact, I know why I have lost it, it’s because Charlotte wanted  some CDs and I told her that she couldn’t until she learned about being tidy...for at least a week.
I went out and came back to find she had tidied my bloody desk !!! Now I have lost everything including my list!

Now I want to tell you about the rheumatologist and white blood cells, and about Ady’s hair and my choir..hmm, I had written other things down, but I can’t remember them for the moment. I’m sure that once I get going, they will come to me.

I will start with rheumatology.
We went to see Ady’s nice consultant to talk about starting back on the Methotrexate. I think I have told you this before, but never mind, a recap is never a bad thing  eh !
Anyway, he said to start back on the Methotrexate, doing 10mg for a couple of weeks and build up to his usual 22.5mg. He wanted bloods taken every 2 weeks for 6 weeks and then monthly after that.
He took a blood test while we were there and his white cells came back at something like 3.5, which by all accounts, is getting quite low.
The rheumy nurse and I agreed that it is probably to do with the radiotherapy and it should sort itself out. Well a couple of weeks later, he had another test done and his white cells were still dropping...they were about 3.2, so the rheumy nurse spoke to the consultant and he said to stop all of his arthritis drugs and see what happens to the white cells and then he will make a plan.
So, Ady has come off his Sulphasalazine and methotrexate and his white cells have come up to 4.8, which I assume is a good thing, even though he now has a stinking cold. He is not sure if his bones ache cos he has man flu or if it is because he is off the drugs.
I must ring the rheumy nurse on Monday and speak to her.

Last year, I was asked by my friend Gill, if I wanted to join a choir, but to be honest, that was the last thing I had on my mind at the time, but now things have settled down a bit, I thought I would go along and see what it was all about. Well blimey, what fun it is, I love it!
I go along once a week for a couple of hours, forget the world and its woes and have a good old sing song. And before you start sniggering, our choir leader says I have a lovely voice..so there!
It also happens, which is VERY handy, that our choir leader was a GP and she says I can ask her any questions I like and she will be very happy to answer them. She is also a right old laugh.
We had a good chat about white cells and she said not to worry until they get to about 1, so I am not worrying and Ady is just going with the flow.

As I think you know, Ady is taking Casodex 150mg for six months to try and stop any possible lurking cancer cells feeding off his testosterone and multiplying. Well, there was me thinking yay, he will be multitasking and asking for directions before the week is out, when all that has happened is that he has started growing some bum fluff on the top of his head. He is absolutely delighted! I think he looks a pratt, but he doesn’t care.He says he wants to enjoy his hair while he has it.
In fact, it has made all of his hair go a bit bum fluffy and fly away and now he has started complaining about bad hair days....for goodness sake!

The other thing the casodex has done, is zapped all of his energy. He is knackered all day. (Ady says, just like a woman.....knackered all day and can’t do feck all). So then he has this whole guilt thing going on in his brain all day about whether he is just being lazy and should fight it and try and go to work, or whether he should go with the flow and sleep it off when he is tired.
He doesn’t just doze when he sleeps, he is completely out for the count and I have to give him a jolly good shaking to wake him up.
He drives me around the twist sometimes, with his guilt trips. There he is, trying to complete his treatment for cancer, the second cancer, off all his arthritis medication cos his white cells are up the shoot, so that needs sorting, plus all the other things that are wrong with him and the silly sod thinks he should be going out for the day digging over someone’s bloody rose bed!!
Thank the Lord that we went to see his oncologist the other day who told him not to fight the tiredness and to sleep his way through it. Work can wait.
Well because someone in authority has ‘given him permission’ to sleep, he is quite happy with that arrangement and so hopefully the guilt conversations will stop!
The Oncologist also said that she is very pleased that his PSA has remained at zero and because of that, she is discharging him from her care, back into the care of Mr D our urologist.
She said that she hopes, in the nicest possible way that she doesn’t see him again. I didn’t like to ask what she thought the chances of that happening were and from what I have learnt about prostate cancer, is that it has no rules and it takes no set path of destruction.
Prostate cancer has a complete mind of its own and is totally unpredictable.
I really really hope, in the nicest possible way of course, that we don’t see her again, but I have a nagging gut feeling from his ‘high risk’ stats, that we just might do.
For the moment, we are going to get used to the ‘new normal’ we have found. The one where all the cancers have been packed away in a box, get the casodex finished in August and then tightly cross our fingers that the PSA doesn’t rise next year, or the year after, or even the year after that...we will get used to it...you have to!

Someone said to me the other day “It’s not the lion you are watching that will get you, it’s the snake creeping up your leg that you didn’t see”

Blimey, that made me think a bit!

1 comment:

  1. Thanks Emma... was waiting for the latest and it was well worth waiting for! Had run out of reading..Love Pruex

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