Hypochondriac Drama Queen

I have always been fairly chilled out when it comes to health. I seem to have a special talent for catching almost every cold that gets passed around throughout the winter months so I'm pretty experienced at just battling on through the mucus, and until October 2013, I hadn't been to my GP for six or seven years. Minor illnesses just don't phase me - I've had enough experience of them to know that they normally clear up on their own. I also know enough about science to be aware that demanding antibiotics for an infection that is probably viral is pretty much the least helpful thing you can do for yourself/the future of medicine, and pretty much the most helpful thing you can do with regard to aiding our friendly neighbourhood bacteria in their quest to mutate into Scary Incurable Plague Monsters.

As soon as you become a chemo patient, you apparently can't afford to have this attitude. The number of times I have been warned against catching an infection is verging on the absurd, and I'd probably find it funny if my doctors didn't go to such great lengths to scare me out of my skin every time it's mentioned. Chemotherapy is designed to destroy cancer cells, but it's not quite advanced enough yet to target only cancer cells, which means it wreaks havoc on your immune system too (among other things such as the lining of your gut and, weirdly, for me, the nerves in my fingertips). My body's defences, which used to fight off coughs and sniffles like a champ, are compromised, and my chilled out response to minor ailments has been thrown out the window. Please welcome to the stage Abi in her new role as Hypochondriac Drama Queen.

The first manifestation of this newfound hypochondria was a few weeks ago, a couple of days before I had plans to visit Durham (I was in danger of going entirely doolally if I didn't go somewhere that wasn't my house or the hospital as soon as humanly possible). Now, I'm going to need you to bear with me for this. We may be entering into the perilous realm of Too Much Information. One thing you have to understand is that once you get into a medical situation which affects pretty much your entire body, any squeamishness you may have had discussing your bodily functions quickly evaporates. I am asked on a regular basis how my bowel movements are, and even if they weren't perfectly normal (which they are, for the record), I don't feel I'd have much difficulty describing in exactly what way they were 'not normal'. I now understand how pregnant women are able to be so bloody open. It's just anatomy. Get over yourselves.

So it was the Monday after Wednesday chemo and I was reaching the end of the super-fatigued spell that always follows my chemo sessions. I was starting to feel a little more normal with regard to chemo side effects (aside from the sore prickly mouth and inexplicably voracious appetite) - but I was also feeling the creeping beginnings of symptoms of something like cystitis. Cystitis is inflammation of the bladder or urinary tract, and it is usually caused by a bacterial infection. Basically, it makes you need to pee all the time, and sometimes makes peeing kind of painful. If you're savvy to the ways of drinking ALL THE WATER, consuming a lot of cranberry juice, and (apparently, though please don't quote me; it's all reported wisdom) a supplement called D-Mannose, a healthy immune system tends to be able to get rid of the infection by itself, without ever needing to go near a pharmacy. Unfortunately, my immune system at the time could not exactly be described as 'healthy'.

In all honesty, the symptoms I was experiencing were pretty mild, but they were enough to send me into a Worry Spiral of Doom. I made the mistake of googling something like 'chemo UTI', which provided me with a handy and exhaustive list of worst-case scenarios which left me all but convinced that if I didn't get my hands on some antibiotics as a matter of urgency, I'd be hooked up to a drip for a week with a complicated and totally unnecessary kidney infection. I got myself worked up enough that I called the Christie Hotline for some advice, which was a big deal when you consider that talking on the phone still makes me so nervous that I often forget how to form sentences. The Christie is the name of the hospital where I am being treated, and the hotline is in place for all the stupid questions a patient may have between visits. Despite the fact that I was using the number for its exact intended purpose, I still felt like the most colossal drama queen who was making a fuss over nothing.

Long story short, the hotline people told me to see my GP, who told me to pee in a pot and then dipped a little strip of paper in said pee. After a couple of minutes during which he flapped the bit of paper about waiting for the results to develop, I was informed that I probably didn't have an infection after all, I could go to Durham as planned, and he'd give me a ring if after a bit more lab testing of my pee, it did indeed transpire that I had an infection. Turns out I was fine, and the symptoms were likely just chemo side effects, much like my sore mouth. As much as this was a relief, it did nothing to banish my sense of being a fusspot, worrypants, and utter hypochondriac.

A second episode occurred just over a week ago, where a sore throat led to a late-night visit to A&E on the advice of first the Christie, and then the out-of-hours GP. The attitude of the nurse I saw ('What did they send you here for? We're not oncologists!') did nothing to help my self-consciousness of the mildness of my concerns, but I was just following orders! I finally managed to explain myself well enough to get a blood test, the results of which revealed that my immune system had recovered enough for me to cope with a cold anyway. The fact that this encounter took place in A&E only managed to make me feel even MORE like I was wasting everybody's time - especially at this time of year, when we are made painfully aware of the the overloading of emergency departments because people think they're dying from a cold (which, come to think of it, for me and my limited supply of white blood cells, could actually be the case).

As awkward as these experiences have made me feel, the doctrine of INFECTION=BAD has been so thoroughly drummed into my skull that I feel I am destined to continue having them until my treatment is over. I hope that eventually, I will be able to re-adopt my old attitude of taking some ibuprofen and waiting for it to go away, but until then I will have to make a grudging peace with the hypochondriac that has taken root in me, and simply do my best to ignore the voices in my head that insist I'm just being a drama queen. In the meantime, please bear with me as I flap about and convince myself I'm dying at every small sign of malaise. Who knows, next time, I might be right...

I Feel Like A Fake Sick Person

I know this title may seem kind of confusing at the moment, because from most angles, it looks like illness has taken over almost every aspect of my life. But let me explain.

My diagnosis, back in October, was for stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which, no two ways about it, is a scary sounding disease. Especially the stage IV part – normally diagnosis with any type of cancer at stage IV is pretty much an imminent death sentence. You tell people about it and they do the face (you’re probably doing it now) – the oh-my-goodness-I'm-here-for-you face. People ask you ‘how is treatment going?’ with a polite but semi-pained expression, and everybody is a bit too squeamish to utter the word ‘chemotherapy’ because they all associate it with waif-like ‘brave souls’ with bald heads and hollow eyes.

I feel like most people have expectations for what this illness is supposed to do to you and when I don’t meet those expectations, I'm violating some sort of unwritten contract. I'm letting you all down by not being sick enough. This effect is compounded somewhat by being the vicar’s daughter in the kind of village community where 'being the vicar’s daughter' means something. I spent a few weeks enduring an endless barrage of cards and flowers (some of which were, rather bizarrely, addressed only to my parents, as though it was them, and not me, who were being used as human pincushions), and was caught off guard that my overriding reaction wasn't ‘I am so grateful for these flowers and well-wishes’ – it was ‘I don’t feel like I am sick enough for everyone to treat me so kindly.’

So I think it's time to clear up a few misconceptions some people might have:

1. I am NOT DYING (cue party poppers, fanfares etc. etc.). Well, that’s a lie. I am dying, but only in the existential, ‘life is but a slow march towards our inevitable demise’ sense in which we are all dying. In fact, Hodgkin’s is one of the few cancers where stage IV is still totally ‘curable’, it just means I have to have a bit more chemo than I would otherwise. Even then, it’s only really stage IV on a mostly inconsequential technicality involving a lung (I’m sure you don’t need all the gory details). Basically, the gist is, if you’re going to get cancer, Hodgkin’s is probably one of the more convenient ones to get. It’s very likely that eventually, I will be fine.
2. I’m not going to be offended if you’re curious and have questions. People have a disconcerting habit of assuming diagnosis has turned you into this delicate precious flower who can’t cope with discussion of the realities of their everyday life without shattering into a million pieces. In truth, diagnosis has had rather the opposite effect of desensitising me to a lot of things which might have upset me before, and transforming me into a new creature composed almost entirely of prescription drugs and sarcasm. I have discovered that most doctors desperately need lessons in tact and generally treating their patients like human beings rather than collections of limbs and organs which need to be scanned/prodded/biopsied/[insert mad scientist procedure here], and thus, over the past three months, my skin has just about tripled in thickness. Ask me your question. Honestly, I can probably handle it.
3. Chemo isn’t as bad as you might think. For the most part, it simply gives me an excuse to sleep until early afternoon, wear joggers a lot, and conduct day-long marathons of Friends without feeling guilty about it. It can be frustrating on the days where I have no energy, especially since I have spent my whole life being the kind of person who needs to tick things off a to-do list in order to feel sane. On some days, I have actually written myself a list with three items on, two of which are ‘shower’ and ‘get dressed’, simply to afford myself the illusion of productivity. But if a week of tiredness is the worst thing I have to deal with, do I really have any right to complain? I then get the ‘good week’ of my chemo cycle and, provided that I avoid extremely crowded places and people with man-flu, I'm able to continue with life pretty much as normal.

There’s this batty old lady at church who keeps giving dad things to give to me. First it was a packet of rich tea biscuits because apparently that’s what people having chemo eat. Then it was a cutting from some kind of shrub or tree or something, which I ‘might enjoy the smell of and like to watch as it comes into flower’, and just yesterday it was a knitted knee blanket, because I'm ‘going to have to go to chemo when it’s cold in January’. I don’t need any of these things! These are Real Sick Person things! I don’t eat rich teas, I eat ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING because part of my prescription involves steroids; I don’t need to watch some twigs flowering because, contrary to popular belief, I am not completely bedridden; and I definitely don’t need a knee blanket, and can’t fathom when and why anybody would ever need a knee blanket. This batty old woman however, will not take no for an answer and I am left wondering what to do with these things and feeling for all the world like some terrible, terrible fraud.

Abi xx

A rambly sort of introduction

If you're reading this, chances are you already know who I am. I'm not naive enough to assume that my foetus of a blog is going to reach an audience of more than the few people who I over-enthusiastically message the link to, but just in case you got lost on your way to your next cat video and inexplicably found yourself here, let me inform you that your hair is looking fantastic today. Also, hi. I'd try to tell you roughly what to expect from this blog but at the moment, that's as much a mystery to me as it is to you. I always find the best way to avoid disappointment when embarking on something new is to get people to lower their expectations, that way even the most lame and vacuous thing I fart out might seem at least a little bit interesting. Feel free adjust yours accordingly. I'll wait for you.

Done? Grand. Now, I'm not going to lie to you, I'm basically only here because I have nowhere better to be. Fills you with confidence doesn't it? In all seriousness though, I am actually feeling quite excited about this whole thing. It's been far too long since I've written anything of substance and I'm definitely out of practice, but the only way to get back into practice is to... practise? Normally, university would serve to fill the void but my current (with any luck, temporary) occupation of Full Time Ill Person has delayed my return, leaving me with more time and more opinions that I know what to do with. Cue: shiny new blog.

I won't flatter myself with the assumption that I have anything especially new or original to offer the internet, but equally I think I have had a unique enough life so far to be able to contribute something. A cool side effect of writing about your thoughts is that it makes you examine them first, which helps you get rid of the illogical and toxic and downright bizarre and leave your head all shiny and full of happy things. At least, you'd hope it works like that, but I'm sure it doesn't really. I know there's a lot of weird that slips through my net, and it's been nesting between my ears for so long now that I'm kind of attached to it. The resident weird tends to make periodic appearances on my tumblr in the form of ranty, disjointed streams of consciousness but I'm hoping this blog will be better than that. It's going to be like my tumblr's responsible older sister, but the sort of responsible where it's also kind of cool and maybe agrees to buy my tumblr alcohol every so often provided it promises to not get pregnant. I'm not sure where this is going. Bad analogy is bad. Anyway, the point is that I'll try my best, but I can't guarantee the things you read here will be 100% sane 100% of the time. I'd tell you I'm sorry but I don't think I am.

These introduction-type posts always feel a little bit awkward so I won't draw out the misery any longer. I'll be back soon with something slightly more substantial; until then, I don't really have a good way to end this post. Everyone likes cake right? Cake is good? I'll leave you with cake.

Cake.

Abi xx