Month: December 2024

Treatment Progress Check: All done, baby! I’m over the remaining side effects except that my feet are still oddly tender, so I wear my comfiest slippers everywhere. Then my sister-in-law showed me where to get even comfier shoes and I ordered them almost immediately.

This is the official end of the Treatment Progress Check.

Well, you read it already; treatments are done! Did I ring another bell? Reader, I did. Well, it was actually a bell app on my phone, and I shook my phone. And the bell was quiet because we were having supper in a restaurant, partly to celebrate me and partly to celebrate my daughter’s 8th birthday, which coincided with the last day of my pills!

The worst and most annoying of the treatment’s side effects are behind me, and I’ve been feeling really well for the past couple of days. (Some tummy troubles aside, but that probably has more to do with the quantities of Christmas gathering food I’ve been consuming than any pill stuff.)

One of the things I will not miss — and it doesn’t look like I’ve ever mentioned this on the blog? — is that while on treatments I’m supposed to flush every toilet twice. This was during my five cycles as well as during radiation / chemo in the summertime. The reason is that, while taking chemotherapy drugs, my bodily fluids become cytotoxic, meaning they can cause damage to human cells. Flushing twice is one way that I was meant to keep my toxicity away from others. In practice, it involved a lot of me standing there, impatiently waiting while the tank refilled so I could wash my hands and get on with my day.

One of the things I worry about, going forward, is that I will lose what I have learned about slowing down and caring for myself. I’ve written a lot about the impulse to Do All the Things when I’m feeling well, and the way I’ll push myself when it isn’t really necessary. Now that I’m feeling pretty well all the time, am I going to remember to take care of myself too? I’m not sure. It’s early days in my ‘break’ period, and eventually I might be forced to slow down a lot if surgery goes ahead like they’ve indicated. I’ll most likely let y’all know how it goes.

I’ve now got dates near the end of January for a sigmoidoscopy (like a colonoscopy, but not as ‘far in’ ) and an MRI. Then we get to await the results and talk about what comes next. In the mean time, I’ve got another period of just…carrying on with my life.

Oh! It might be early days to talk about this but I’ve been contacted by the CancerCare Manitoba Foundation to chat and become a featured story as part of a fundraising effort in the coming year. More info as I get it.

Treatment Progress Update: As I write this I’m just two days away from being done treatments altogether. We don’t really have a good bell at home so I’m planning to use an airhorn sound effect app I have on my phone to celebrate. I’m feeling really well, generally, and I’m back up to drinking refrigerated things but I’m too nervous to try ice cream just yet.

Feelings check!

I am feeling hopeful. Treatments are nearly done, which means I’ve gotten through the worst of the treatment-related side effects. I’m feeling my daughter’s hand brushing my beard as she tries to help me write this paragraph (that’s her green title card up above there). I’m feeling like I want to lie down and sleep (“for a thousand years” adds Cassidy, helpfully). I’m feeling happy, because she turns 8 tomorrow. And it’s nearly Christmas. And I get a buncha weeks off from any testing or treatments or phone calls.

Okay, I’m writing this on my own again. Growing up we didn’t really observe the Advent season in any meaningful way, outside of getting tiny, waxy chocolates from cardboard calendars sold in stores. A few years ago Lori took the initiative to start a small Christmas Advent tradition in our house — each night (when we remember, tbh) we light the appropriate number of candles, name what they’re meant to remind us of, and usually do a little reading from the Bible.

Something I’ve been learning about through these Advent seasons is that they are to be experienced as a time unto themselves, not simply counting down the days to Christmas. Four weeks spent contemplating hope, joy, peace, and love, while also reminding yourself that we really don’t know what’s coming next for us. This year has been full of twists and turns for myself, some positive and some negative, as I suspect it has been for many reading this as well. Online, folks like to joke about having a bingo card for the year, and that whatever thing just happened was emphatically not on it. For instance, some things that weren’t on my 2024 bingo card could be —

• getting a cancer diagnosis, of course
• getting my first tattoos (dots, but still)
• standing on the field of the Winnipeg Blue Bomber stadium

…and so on. We like to hope that the years will roll onward with no major surprises and in a fairly orderly, planned way. But that isn’t what life has in store for us. In our first years of marriage, my wife and I felt that things were almost too good (subtle brag, I know), and at times we were anxious about an invisible hammer coming down and changing everything for the worse. But none of the worrying we did prepared us for what ended up happening anyway. Worrying, it turns out, was a total waste of time and energy.

Live in hope for the future, with joy at the wonders around us, in peace with others, and love for all. You don’t have to quit once the Advent season is over. It’s not easy and you’ll lose sight of it sometimes. But it’s worth trying, and beats the heck out of the alternatives.

Treatment Progress Check: Currently I am on day 4 of my final chemo treatment cycle. I’m recovering from the IV chemotherapy but still taking pills, and today my body feels very heavy. I’m having to really manage my energy and expectations. Because you know, Saturdays (when I start writing these) are for Doing Stuff! Making big to-do lists and crushing them! At least, that’s normally the idea.

At the outset of this post I don’t think I have any grand insights or nuggets of wisdom to share. Let’s do something else and look at a bunch of pictures from the week instead.

The above picture is from my last treatment. Don’t I look like I’m handling things well? I suppose I did, but emotions ran very high on those days. You can’t see them, but I’m wearing the last pair of surprise socks that some friends of ours got me. There were three pairs, and I saved them and parcelled them out to myself on treatment days. They’re supposed to be glow-in-the-dark but I haven’t adequately tested them at the time of this writing.

I won’t miss the ward, but there was an absolutely beautiful watercolour painting of a prairie sky with a golden field and grain elevator that I looked at a lot. We sat in the same spot for each treatment, and the painting was a calming thing to stare at while various things got poked into me, or tape got pulled off (curse my hairy arms).

As before, during the radiation treatments, there’s still more to do. But ringing the bell marks an important milestone in its own way. And both times, I somehow wasn’t expecting people to clap and cheer, so it felt genuinely nice. Actually, it felt like the way the villagers gather round and clap for you in the game Animal Crossing. (This is why my daughter says I’m “the nerdiest boy in the house”. She instructed me to put those exact words in this blog post)

If you go back to the video you can see the painting I was talking about. You can also see that my right arm is held rather stiffly. This is because it is extremely tender from the treatments, and touching it both hurts (like a bruise) and sets off a wave of unpleasant tingling sensations. The whole effect takes a few days to subside. As of today I’m no longer aware of my arm inside its sweater sleeve.

One thing that’s been pretty consistent throughout this experience is that my kids don’t seem to be very worried about me. Which is great! There’s nothing they can do by worrying, and we’ve worked to keep things as normal as possible while I do treatments and go to appointments. We’ve definitely been keeping an eye on them and I have supports available if we feel they need someone else to talk to about this experience, but neither Lori nor myself have really noticed them acting out of the ordinary. They play together, they squabble, usual sibling stuff.

For what it’s worth, the pets don’t seem very agitated, either.

Well, there you have it. This has been my weekly check-in. One day this’ll be a distant memory, so I’m glad I’m writing these things down now.

Treatment Progress Update: I was supposed to have started my fifth and final cycle this week but there was a slight complication — more on that in the body of this post. I’m feeling really well and drinkin’ cold stuff right out of the fridge. Not looking forward to losing this ability again come Tuesday, but I am looking forward to it being the last time I’ll lose it.

Something I’ve generally tried not to do is ‘play the cancer card’; Meaning, I try not to demand special treatment or status because of my illness. I think I’ve written a bit about this before.

This last Monday, however, there was the complication I mentioned. I met with my family doc in the morning to do a pre-op checkup regarding the surgery that is likely to happen early next year. This wasn’t a physical exam in the sense that I expected — mostly just a big questionnaire that we both had to fill out. While I was there I asked for a flu shot, as I am immuno-suppressed and cold/flu season is in full swing. They gave me a High Dose and I went away satisfied.

Well. That afternoon I developed a persistent cough and started shivering uncontrollably for several hours straight, while my temperature climbed into the (low) fever regions. We wondered aloud if it was just me reacting to the flu shot, but here’s the thing: when you have cancer they will tell you that if you have even a mild, low-grade fever, you need to get yourself into the E.R. immediately. It could be nothing, but it could also be a clue to a more serious infection happening somewhere in the body that could greatly complicate matters. Then, they give you a pink card that has your name and treatment details and some instructions for the attending E.R. physician. One of the instructions is that you are to be seen as quickly as possible.

So it’s a literal cancer card.

We called in Lori’s folks to watch the kids and off we went to the hospital, which was already having a pretty busy night. And yes, I brought the card, and showed it to the triage nurses. I was whisked in and put through various tests (blood, urine, X-rays of my chest) with relatively little wait time between stops. As a people-pleaser it did not necessarily feel good to be shuttled past folks that looked like they’d been waiting a long time, but all along I was assured by staff that coming in was the right call and that I wasn’t abusing the system in any way.

We did still end up being there for a couple of hours in total, what with waiting for test results and talking to the doctors & nurses. Still, I definitely walked out past people in the waiting area who had been there when I came in. In the end I was prescribed a short course of antibiotics, which ended up delaying the IV chemo treatment I was supposed to have had the next day. They didn’t want to overlap the chemotherapy & antibiotics, apparently. This was disappointing, as I had been looking forward to being over my treatments by Christmas Day and now…I’ll still be feeling a bit yucky.

Still, I get a good New Years’ 🙂

(As an epilogue: the cancer ward called me a few days later and said they’d talked to my family doc and learned about the high dose flu shot. We agreed that it was probably the culprit. “That wasn’t in the notes from the ER”, they said, and I am not sure because I feel like I definitely mentioned it? But anyway, they said I could stop the antibiotics immediately and get ready to get treated on Tuesday next.)

The kind of person I am is one that historically has not liked to make waves or take up too much space. My illness makes that mission much more difficult. I needed rides to the city in summertime, I need to take more downtime to look after myself, I need time off from work for appointments. Even getting priority access to the E.R.. All of these things, I start to tell myself, increase the burden and workload of people around me, and how dare I do that? But I would happily do what I could for family and friends in the same predicament. Maybe one day I will have an opportunity to pay it forward. Maybe I will not, and will simply have to accept the kindness and generosity of those who carried me when I couldn’t walk on my own.

Either way, I’m continuing to try and convince myself that I can take up space in the world. The work will probably continue well after this ‘cancer’ business is behind me. C’est la vie!