Pick yourself up.... Dust yourself off.... And go again

Everyone says I look so well, so what’s the reality? Unless you’re in the house and family it’s actually quite hard to comprehend the daily struggles of movement that I have and the breathing issues. But each week there are different hurdles to overcome. Below is my treatment this week and all the tablets I have to take to keep me pain free and alive. These change every week so chemotherapy on top of that from Friday. I do have choices not to take all this but I want to maximise the time I have! 5 x radiotherapy on hip 7 x  Lanzaprazole 7 x Magnsium citrate  7 x saviour D3 7 x Hylo forte (intensive eye lubricant) 14 x Adcal tablets 14 x Fragmin blood thinning injections  1150mg Pregabalin ( nerve pain management) Steroids 56mg Haemmorhoid cream Phosphate Sandoz for liver  For me sharing this information with the kids is so important and them knowing exactly where I am up to and they are pleased I do.  We take each breath for granted until it becomes difficult to do so. It’s not possibl

When my surgeon walked into my hospital room in September last year and told me I had six to nine months to live and to get Amy back from university I was furious. How dare she put a date on my life and tell me how to manage my family. So I’ve been proving her wrong ever since!  Palliative community care nurses have discharged me as I clearly don’t require them yet. 6 mths ago the nurses and my GP rang me every couple of weeks. It’s a great feeling, I’ve proved to them all that I’m here to fight & I’m not going anywhere soon!  Covid has also been ticked off. After two years of avoiding it I finally caught it in Italy. I was relieved to get it ticked off the list and the anti viral vaccination saw it off in days. Now I’m quadruple vaxxed and full of anti viral too, so hard as nails and out everywhere.  There are some advantages to this whole journey…. I can park anywhere with my disabled badges, love abandoning the car outside The Grosvenor in town or on double yellows outside Clatt

I currently have what is known in the trade as moon face caused by the steroids I have been taking. I’ve just stopped taking them so I should deflate slowly but luckily I have sam to prod my cheeks and update me on my progress on that front! I’m just keeping an eye out for the wrinkles coming back.  I’ll be honest December was hard, my blood had become too toxic and I was on my knees. I had a blood transfusion and a platelet transfusion and was pretty much in every day for blood tests.  BUT I got out of hospital Christmas Eve at 5pm and managed to spend Christmas Day with my babies! AND 2022 is going to be a great one. It’s started very well! 9 out of 10 tumours in my head are not visible currently! That’s significant. I’m a big believer in not asking things you don’t need to know and I am glad I didn’t ask anything about the size of the tumours at the start. Of the 10, 7 were small and 3 were large apparently. Of the 3 large ones the two that are not visible were 2 cm each which is th

 I’m currently lying in a hospital bed in the critical dependency unit at Clatterbridge relieved to be here and reflectively amused. Dropping off to sleep last night my phone rang late. Both kids in house, tick. I checked phone and it was a call from Clatterbridge at 10.30pm at night. What on earth was going on? Pretty sure my consultant wasn’t calling with his bedtime cocoa in hand. ‘Hi Mrs Miln, I’m a registrar from Clatterbridge. Can I ask you have you got pains in your chest or are you struggling to breathe?’ ‘Well up until 10 seconds ago no! Now I feel like you’ve just sat on my chest and have your hands round my throat. Why?’ ‘We’ve picked up from your scan Thursday you have a blood clot on your lung and we need to treat it urgently to get rid of it. 3 months of injections.’ A discussion around avoiding Chester A&E ensued and I said it’s fine we’ll come straight to Clatterbridge now. On reflection and only on reflection as I’ve had a sleepless night thinking about the little

As you all know I’m a pretty positive person but the last 4 weeks have been horrendous. Staying on treatment and not missing one is such a psychological roller coaster. Unfortunately I turned up for my day 8 second chemo, bloods were good but I had a temperature. I say a temperature, just 0.3 over! Temperatures on chemo are a no no so within 10 minutes I’m sat on a ward with IV antibiotics pumping into me. So after taking bloods etc they couldn’t find an infection and I was so frustrated but they still wouldn’t give it to me. The next two weeks we’re a bit of a haze. I struggled with the effects of day 1 chemo, I was down in the dumps, I had gastritis, thrush, loads of tablets to take and I didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere. In the middle of it all I ended up for an evening in A&E after my vision started blurring and I was struggling to keep on my feet. After another drip of antibiotics and fluids they established I was dehydrated so easily remedied. In amongst all this the p

Fate played its hand immediately and before I knew it I was under a new consultant at Clatterbridge through a contact of ours. Why? Because he’s the world leading expert in metastatic cancer that has spread to the brain! I was give. 5 days of radiotherapy to the head immediately. Ok so as the picture shows it’s not the nicest experience nailed to the bed in a mask which is moulded to your face! But when I was lying there all that went  through my head was that I was doing it for the family and the light from the machine felt a bit like a light from heaven. One week off after radiotherapy and chemotherapy started. So the initial palliative drug I was going to be out on by the other consultant was scrapped and I started carbo gemocide which is a harder and more effective treatment.Both the radiotherapy and chemotherapy shrink the tumours and I’ve managed to reduce the twelve steroids I was on to 1!which is a sure sign things are working! So I’ve got 18 weeks of this drug and then as my c