Finished Chemo and Having Fun

If I've been quiet on the blog recently it's for the best of reasons: I've been too busy having fun.

What a joy to have a few treatment-free, needle-free weeks to spend having long lunches and day trips!  And I am finally really feeling better.  I have a lot more energy: the limb-dragging fatigue has gone and now I just have the sleepiness that comes when you are finally sleeping at night again.  My embarrassing itch bothers me much less, as do the hot flushes which come less often and more mildly. 

It's easy to forget how far I've come: yesterday I knelt down and realised that I felt no pain at all.  Just a week or two ago, I couldn't kneel without intense pain down my thighs.

But there is always some two-steps-forwards-one-step-back.  My left arm - where I had the lymph nodes removed- has been stiff and sore again .  Apparently this is normal, my physio described it as something like fibrosis of the lymphatic system.  I have a new exercise which involves hanging onto the top of a door or high shelf and twisting: I'm finding lots of places that have never been dusted but it's working.

I have a new discomfort too, though this is rather more positive: my wig has become itchy and uncomfortable because my hair is growing.  But the new growth is so short, fine and white that I still look completely bald, so it's headscarf time.  I think my eyebrows might be coming back a little too, tiny fair hairs have appeared between the old, black ones.

Another couple of weeks and I will start radiotherapy.  This worries me a lot less than the chemo did, somehow I'd rather be zapped than hooked up to chemicals.  Besides, when you have slogged through five months of chemo, a mere six weeks of treatment doesn't seem that bad even if it is every day. 

The thing that was worrying me the most was (of all things) the parking at the hospital.  With my enormous car, the prospect of navigating the tiny basement car park and hoping for a space big enough to manoeuvre into every day was much more terrifying than being zapped.  But I have now had a little miracle.  A friend asked me what I needed during radio and I jokingly replied: a parking space.  And she has found me one!  Her daughter's boyfriend lives right opposite the hospital and has parking that I can use. 

So that's the logistics sorted, now I have another ten days to enjoy having fun before the treatment starts again.