My Life In Pictures.

Hello, again, my friends.   Today’s little bloggy woggy is just a little collection of pictures to illustrate some of the things I have been going through this last year.   Have no fear nor dread… there’ll be a narrative to accompany each picture to make your viewing more pleasurable.    I must warn you now some of the pictures towards the end are of a more shocking or unpleasant nature.   I’ve ordered them in such a way that they get progressively worse but never fear I will warn you when the going starts to get a little more rough.    Obviously, its up to you to venture as far into this passage as much as you wish.    I explained to my support team that I wanted to put these pictures up for memery’s sake.    

Just one or two shout outs this time, kids…

To my fellow cud lover ‘the flan’…   here are my answers…

No 1,    not exactly D.L.E.R.C.

No 2,    I have no idea, I can’t even think of a Charlatans song right now

No 3,    Fools Gold!

Thanks for the text pub quiz to keep me entertained for a wee while.   I promise my answers are genuine and have NOT been google’d.   Plus those mega warm socks you gave me, flan, do exactly what they say on the tin, I’ll tell yer!!!   Mmmh lovely!!

To the family of Framptons.    Thank you guys for all the messages, financial support and gifts…   it all means so much, thank you thank you thank you!

And that’s about it, really.   So, dear reader… let us cease with all this dilly dally and get straight on in there…

Now… we start with our old friend the R2D2 wanna be… er… Malcom!?!    If you have a keen eye and a reasonable memory you would know from my last blog entry that my stem cells were wheeled into the room as I was freaking out in this little ‘star wars’ super star.   Picture, if you will, him sitting in the corner of my room with his hat offset at a jaunty angle with tons of dry ice, white smoke, pouring over the top and sliding down and across the floor.   It was just another new, alien object introduced into my life, just at a time when it was all really coming on top!!!   We saw him ‘chilling’ (ah! ‘scuse the pun!) at the nurses station, so I managed to get a snap shot of the little blighter for you.

As they should say to every act on the X Factor… “NEXT!”….

Ahh… my semi successful attempt to photo stitch a fish eye shot of my private room from the perspective of my bed.   Excuse the massive distortion at the top of the picture (that air con vent is straight!) but all in all a successful capture of the inside of my room.   Nice and modern, innit?    Our bedroom tv, (I know… a tv in our bedroom, terrible!) PS3 and digital radio (thank you E & Lu) are way over in the distance, opposite.   The private toilet/shower room is there on the right.   Also on the right, hanging up, is a unit of blood, mid transfusion.   On the left hand side is the windows you can normally view Smithfield market and the BT tower and Centre point.    In the far distance just off to the right is my exercise bike just in front of the window where I can see where my mum and dad and the Russian park their cars.   Its where, at the end of the day, I wave like an idiot and sit in the window until the car disappears around the corner like a 1 yr old puppy!!!

What have we here…. ?  Why its the inscrutable Dr Shamash and just some of the 12 disciples that follow him around noting everything he says.   I wanted to give some perspective to the coliseum type surround you get when, sometimes a mini bus of quacks arrives outside your room and its contents pile out and surround your bed.   There are actually more people in the room, round to the left but as I announced I wanted a photo of the team the crowd parted like the red sea, not wanting any part of it (revealing my mum, stood by the bike) Falling short of all standing there, poking me with biro’s they all listen to the guvnor talk about you whilst scribing into thick file folders.   They do address you from time to time and do take a genuine interest in your personal wellbeing… having just discussed your actual health amongst themselves back in the mini bus, parked in the hall!   ;-)

Ah, now… This is to do with the undisclosed side effects of cancer treatments.   We all know the classics… hair loss, chronic weight loss and sickness ect ect….    Nobody told me about the sheer volume of earwax build up that has started to plague me!!!   Here is a piccie of the Russian utilising the very bright lamp on her padded laptop tray to get to the heart of the candle wax factory that seems to have set up residence inside my noggin!   Don’t fear, reader, the next shot isn’t a close up of the ear bud covered in dark brown gunk!   Although I was tempted!

Here I am at Wembley, many months ago weighing in at a fighting weight of 105kg’s … as my consultant DR Shamash said to me… “you must’ve been a bit of a chubber!!!   HEY, THANKS!!! So, here I am… FAT!

And here I am only a few days ago after a year’s ‘chemo diet’ and down to my new record low of 75Kg’s!!!   I’m currently back up to about 78Kg’s with my appetite back and still on the build up, Hi Kal shake drinks.   In the pic, I’m in my room just about to pass through the door, behind, into the shower.   Ladies note the lunch box!!! It looks massive!!   All perspective, really…  it always looked so small when I ever looked down when I was healthy/chubby!!!   Note, the pictures are slightly stepping up in shock factor… you can clearly see the full extent of my Hickman line that is used to administer blood/platelets/drugs and also withdraw bloods.   (said in an electronic voice)  “I AM A ROBOT… NER NER NERRRR!”   So here I am in current form…. THIN!

FAT!!!

FAT!!!

THIN!!!

FAT!!!

THIN!!!.......   well….. you get the idea with that!

Here is a misty bad photo of the monster of a machine that extracts your stem cells from your body and saves them for after HDC, high dose chemo.    As its not all that clear to see, it’s a brute of a machine that wizzes, bongs and actually whirr’s like that weird cleaning robot out of the 1970’s hit tv show, rent-a-ghost!   It even has a cute binging bell that sometimes sounds from time to time.   The idea is that they hook you up via one arm, the machine draws blood for 4 hours and it simultaneously returns it, minus the stem cells, into your other arm.    I say it took 4 hours and normally once is enough.    You have to lie dead still, for the whole time, getting fed like an emperor (nice!) and being assisted to pee into a jug! (not so nice!)   Me being me, my blood was not fourth coming with the cells and so this meant I was required to go back on the machine to get more!   A grand total of 4 times at 4 hours a pop was what was needed… in one week, Monday to Thursday!!!   16 bleedin’ hours man!

This older picture is an example of the tricolour of bags of chemo that I was having at guys hospital’s day unit when I was undergoing my first bout of drugs!   I can’t remember exactly what was going in to me when I took this because I can’t remember the names of my “BEP” course but I’ll give it a go…   Bliomison, Ettoposide and Sisplatin, which actually contains platinum in it!   The one of the bags is covered with the red filter bag to knock out certain wavelengths of natural light that affects the gunk inside.   Note the big pump that drives it into your arm and the big Jim’ll fix it fully electric lazy boy chairs that us ‘lucky’ ol’ patients get.   This is all on the 10^th floor of that really nasty looking concrete tower, next to the shard.   The views of London are great from there too.

This blog’s like going through someone’s holiday snaps… only its worse than boring!!!

So, we reach the point in this entry where the pictures take a slight turn for the worse.   So feel free to bail out at anytime.   So to kick us off gently, here is an arty black and white shot of both our cats, Seth and Junior, whom I miss terribly!   All together now… AHHH! (unless you hate cats and would rather an UUGGHHH!)

Here is a closer look at my Hickman Line that I had put in way back in june sometime.    It hurt like billy-o after the surgery but was totally worth it in the end.   This was my first ever time under the surgeons knife.  No nasty canular needles constantly sticking into your arm and a very easy way to get stuff in and out of me, when the friggin’ thing wasn’t all blocked up with bloody gunk!   The tube extends in for about another foot and down to a main vein behind my stomach.  The moment anyone puts a drug into one of the 2 tubes, you get the effect of any side affects, immediately.   So when they used to give me a certain pre medication that made me woosey, I would start feeling tired before the syringe had even finished plunging.    

This nasty little scene is one of my chest x rays.   I had this one done around the middle of the year.   If you can see them, the white dots all over are the cancer spread into my lungs.   Fortunately more recent pictures show far, far less dots, in fact the last one I looked at, on screen, I was hard pressed to see much at all.   But hey, I’m not a radiologist!   The first one I was shown way back in January looked like an abstract artist had been at play with a brush full of white paint!   It looked like said artist was flicking the brush at the picture.   Can you see in the right hand lung a white line going down from top left to bottom right?   That is my Hickman line inside my body coming in at the top of my chest and running down to that main vein I was talking about.   God only knows how, once inside, they connect it to anything!   I didn’t want to ask but I’m curious to know.

This is one where I’m pretty tied up.   I’m all hooked up for an ECG test.   Echo Cardioid err… Groovy test?   I’m not sure of the last word but I’m pretty sure the first 2 are correct.   It measures your heart and its timing by taking different tiny electrical pulses around certain parts of your body.   It checks your pulse synchronisation given off by all the different areas and the machine prints out a graph (you always need a graph in medicine!)  that looks a little like one of them earthquake read outs.   When you see the ECG machine printing it off you can see the various ink scribe arms inside, all twitching away, showing that a force 7.6 is going off!   Then the nurse tears it off, looks at it, looks at you and always says… “I cant read these, I’m of to give it to a doctor, won’t be a sec.”   Then you lie there, waiting for news of your fate for 20 minutes or so and the nurse returns saying, “yup, that’s all fine.”   They gave me an ECG when I freaked out and fainted when I was having my stem cells returned.

Uuugghh!   This is the entry site if my Hickman line when it leaks blood.   It’s a sign that my platelet level is low and I need a platelet transfusion.    Platelets are the things in your blood that help with clotting and when you are low you are at risk to serious bleeding.   One guy told me it took nurses 2 hours and a shed load of cotton wool to stem a nosebleed.   The guy said he ‘paped’ himself at the amount of blood that was issuing fourth out of his bugle!   Nasty, you have to keep an eye on these things.   I was stabbed by a doctor, who was drawing blood the other day (yeah, you Laura!) and I hadn’t kept enough pressure on the puncture site after the needle had been withdrawn.  I only noticed I needed help when the taped swab was now saturated and I was dripping blood off my arm onto my natty bed trousers!   Note the date written in the side of the dressing.   That was only 2 weeks ago when this happened.   They put the date of when the dressing is changed so they can see when it needs changing again.

Right, last 2 shots of this gory tale… and they ain’t that pleasant… you have been warned…

This is a shot of the aftermath of suction and swabbing required to keep my crumbling mouth from clagging up.   The horrible gunk on the side of the bowl is actually bits of my mouth that have been drawn out by salt water rinsing, having a nurse with a mini suction hose, medicated mouth wash and those pink swabs.   It is not very nice and very very sore.   The sort of pain you get when you keep biting your tongue in the same place or the side of your cheek, only sometimes the pain is constant and of such a magnitude (9.8 on the ECG scale) that for 6 days this last month I was on a 24hr syringe driver that slowly administered pain killer morphine.   I kept it in a bum bag (or as the Americans would call it, a fanny pack!   The Russian cracked up when I told her that!)    My parents being them and taking care of me in every way, supplied me said bum bag in which the battery operated syringe driver happily sat in “CCHHIING” away to itself every 20 minutes or so as it doled out another hit of relief.   The sensation in my mouth was such that it felt to my tongue that my teeth had all been removed and replaced by 32 razor blades.   I would have slashes and lacerations all across and down the side of my tongue.   When you looked inside there were big white blisters and the walls off my cheeks would have permanent impressions of my teeth in them.   Ugh, horrible!

So, as old Sir Tervor Mcdonald used to say… “And finally…”

A classy shot of me mid ‘GAMEC’ drug regime when my mouth issues were at their peak!    Constantly drooling blood and mouth lining into a cardboard bowl whilst stemming a nosebleed and thinking strong for everyone by showing the old thumbs up in a Millwall shirt!   That’s true British grit!    Lots of pain, lots of discomfort, lots of digging deep and getting through it…   These drooling sessions would go on for days at a time and sometimes keep me awake at night because I’d be half chocking on mouth fluid!   Nasty business.   The reason for all this mouth collapse is that chemo indiscriminately wipes out all rapid multiplying cells, such as cancer, hair cells and your stomach lining.   Unfortunately your “stomach lining” includes everything from your front lips to your ‘behind’ lips and everything in between.   So not only was there need for days on end of pain killers, there were sustained periods where I didn’t eat for days and was on constant fluid drips for nutrition.  

This is the end of my sorry tale of woe…   I hope my next blog entry is more exciting with better news!?!?!?  

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