The End of Gerryscancerdiary

After 6 months of blogging I think it is time to end the run of gerryscancerdiary as part of the transition back to our normal life. As things stand now all my treatments are complete and I am expected to make a full recovery back to normal health over the next six months.

Since the end of radiotherapy I have had nearly two weeks of holiday time to help my body recover, which will come to an end when I walk back into work on Tuesday next week for my first full day back in the office. So far the recovery has gone well, I do from time to time have some level of chest pain, as there is a reasonable amount of "collateral damage" to the tissue in my chest but its no more than you would feel if a footballer had head butted you at the end of the match. I do not yet have my usual energy level but I was blessed with a lot of natural energy before, so me at 75% can manage pretty well, and may even appear to be normal for a change.

Medically I am done with Hodgkins unless I am one of the unlucky 10 percent who gets the relapse, we will only know that in 1-2 years time, so for now the advice from the doctors is to get back in the game and just be a bit careful for a few months, I am not allowed to travel until mid September and, oddly, not allowed to go to my normal dentist until November so the hospital dentist is going to work on the abscess which made chemo 2 such a misery. I still sleep more than before, but that's no big deal, and my ability to concentrate seems to have returned to something close to normal.

Over the last weeks I have traveled with the kids and my mum to her house in Donegal for a week of playing on the beach, reading books and chilling out, despite the weather, which was not so favorable, but that did not keep Poppy and Holly out of the sea. Lees big conference in Glasgow went very well and she had articles published in the papers here and was on radio quite a lot, for a little while I felt like a press secretary for her as folks from the Sunday and daily newspapers called the house. Then I had a week with Poppy as Lee chilled out up in Deeside with Holly and Poppy had a watersports course at Queensferry, that gave me the time to do three critical things, reassemble my axel, sort out the loft for the builders who start tomorrow and to develop an obsessive interest in series one of "The West Wing" which my friend Charlie lent me and has been captivating all week, in fact I just finished the last episode.

Yesterday was spent at the farewell party for a friend who is going to Oz for a few years, Ken was Lees flatmate at university and introduced us when he worked at ICI Dumfries, so lots of old friends were at the afternoon garden party, which then developed for our group into a dinner party at our house - a great crack, as we say in Ireland, and a fantastic way to end this journey.

So I would once again like to thank all of our friends, family and colleagues who have managed to make our cancer journey a real journey of discovery, friendship, warmth and support which I could not have imagined in the whirl of my life before of this time - you have all been fantastic and we are privileged to know such a great group of people. In many cases you probably did not even realise how supportive just having normal conversations was when underneath I was sometimes not in as nearly a good a shape as I would let on, but all those interactions, even the phone calls from the couch for work, gave me targets day by day to help keep me going. It all really helped. Many of you have been great friends and comfort to us but to start to mention anyone would just keep me here all night, however the unsung hero of this whole time has of course been Lee, she had all of the worry inside but never wavered in her belief that this would work out fine and never allowed me to look on the dark side too much, I am an unreasonably and undeservedly, lucky man.

For the moment I am really looking forward to getting back to normal, though I think in reality normal will be different from here on. It seems to me we spend a short time on this earth and we forget that too often, the friendships we make and the positive difference we make for family, colleagues and friends is more important than all the other games which have different names like politics, results, blame, anger, frustration and winning. I feel have have learnt or relearnt that our work is the game, and an important game, but our relationships and the difference we make are the true reality, so I still hope to play well and with all the skill I can, because its fun and rewarding to do things well, but hopefully with more of a twinkle in the eye and more empathy for the difficult things which all of us face. So next time I ask "how are you" I will mean how are you really, underneath, with all the worries, crap and stresses attached I look forward to seeing a lot of you again face to face for that and many other conversations.

I will have a lot of nostalgia however for the good parts of the time I have spent at home with the family and our friends here in Edinburgh, it has been a very nice time for me and when I walk down the road here I now speak to two or three people every time, I hope I can keep a lot of that up. Spending so much time with Poppy and Holly has been just brilliant and has developed our relationships on many different levels, we have some plans to expand our vacation time in future to make the most of that while they still want to talk to "the old man"

So there it is, the end, I wish you all every blessing in the world and if I can ever help any of you as you have all helped us, it would be a privilege, just call, anytime.

Thanks

Gerry

Fully cooked - no more cancer boy !

As the title indicates I have now officially been fully cooked by my radiotherapy and my treatment for Hodgkins disease is finally, after six months, over ! :-))

It feels good just to write that.

I reality its all a bit of an anticlimax, I went in for my normal zapping and brought a nice big box of chocolate for the staff in the radiotherapy suite. They were pleased with the present and happy that my side effects, other than being a sleepyhead, are so small. We parted with the traditional "hope to not see you again" which is the happy ending greeting the staff all use for both chemo and radiotherapy patients. In reality one in ten of us which this disease will have to troop back into the game but we will not know who that is for about two years. For now we are cured unless someone tells us otherwise and plan to jump back into normal life with gusto, and a bit of a yawn occasionally.

Plans for gusto did not survive well today as I had to do the mundane stuff of picking up the kids who were playing at Jim and Sarahs. I did manage to pick up a cold bottle of bubbly on the way and Sarah and I opened it to celebrate the last treatment, Lee was at the airport picking up some friends from Brazil but phoned in to join the festivities and Jim came home from work just in time to raise a glass. Lee is off entertaining tonight as her big conference is winding up and we have a bunch of the great and the good over for dinner tomorrow so in an interesting role reversal I will be executive's wife for the day cooking (in between sleeps and looking after the childeren who I will press gang into setting the table and helping with the cooking).

So tonight I am sitting on the couch with Poppy, Lucy and Holly watching the "princess diaries" and doing my blog on the laptop - content domestic bliss actually, which I am sure I will miss once I get back into the swing of things at work. They seem to have stacked up a raft of nasty problems for me on my "return" (though as one colleague said - I never really went away) which will keep me going for at least six months to get things back on the even keel that I have taken a bit for granted over the last few years but which unravelled surprisingly quickly once I was out of the line.

So the next two weeks I am regarding as holiday, the consultant said my fatigue should peak around 7 days after the end of the treatment and then slowly get better over about a month, though I am on the robust side as far as my response to the treatment went - I just hope my cancer is not as robust as me !

The first part of the holiday I will take the kids to Donegal with Mum to her holiday house there, hopefully the weather will hold and we will enjoy days on the beach building sand castles, playing football and even the occasional swim. We will set off on saturday and meet most of my family in Bangor before heading to Donegal which will be great fun, we will try to organise a family dinner together. Lee unfortunatly will be stuck back here running her conference ( I have been fielding calls from the local and national papers all week as they are running publicity articles in the science sections of the papers and sunday magazines)

Once we get back then Poppy has a sailing course and I have a bunch of projects (including the much delayed back axel which is still sitting in bits on the floor of the garage) to finish in order to be ready for the building work on the house which starts on the 21st of August. Hopefully we will have on more weekend at the campsite in Aberdeen before we take the tent down for another year.

I will not be blogging when I am in Donegal so I will probably make possibily a final entry or two into the blog to outline how the recovery and the first few weeks in work goes before shutting it down hopefully not to need it again.

For now I would really like to thank all the friends, family and colleagues who have supported us through this whole experience and made what could have been a very difficult time actually a very fulfilling one. Your practicle help, cover in work, friendship, support, humour and taking us away from the grind have been wonderful and inspiring for me. Thank you all very very much you really made a difference, I hope I can be there for you all as much as you have been there for me and the family.

When I look back at this experience I would never wish it on anyone, specially at the start when we thought it was a 50/50 deal ( the odds for the most common types of lymphoma), looking at your childern and your wife and thinking "crap I probably only have a few years left" is not a good experience for anyone at any age. However having lived through the ups and downs and so far being one of the lucky ones, which has its own guilt edge attached having met many who did or will not make it, I can say that the experience will have changed me at a very fundamental level. I feel much less inclined to anger or annoyance, have more time and tolerance for people, and get less stressed about the normal "crises" of work and life. Lets hope I can hold on to that perspective when I am back in the flow of work and normal life, this can be a great learning experience if I am smart enough to learn and act on the lessons.

So back to the couch, the princess diaries, chocolates and childern curled up together, what could be better.....

Cheers and thanks


Gerry

Madonna and woodsmoke

We have had an interesting weekend the highlight of which was Madonnas concert opening her European tour. Along the lines of seizing the day Lee and I bought some tickets for Madonna just after I was diagnosed with Hodgkins and then with all the fuss about the treatment we completely forgot about them. Thankfully Lee had written the date in her diary and remembered that the concert was this Sunday just a few weeks ago.

At first, given all the other things that were going on, we thought of just giving them away to friends but after some discussion we felt that we would try and make it as my immune system is pretty much back to normal after the chemo. So Lee set off to Aberdeen for a bit of a break with the girls while I was having my radiotherapy last Thursday. I was rescued from watching back episodes of the West Wing (thanks Charlie) by Lees friend Lorna who took me out for dinner at a nice resturant with a terrace where we could see the sun set. A great evening where I was feeling the end of the treatment approach.

Lee then left Poppy and Holly with her sister (which they loved as Dot and Gordon took them to the Moscow state circus) and came back to Edinburgh to pick me up along with Gary and his cousin Maxine for the Madonna concernt. Sunday we headed off and had a great time at the concert staying over in Cardiff for the evening, fantastic show, but very tiring so on the way back on Monday I slept in the back seat of the car for about four hours while lee drove home chatting to Maxine (Gary had a meeting in London so could not travel back with us).

I then went to the hospital for my radiotherapy on Monday feeling pretty rested so afterwards I was able to go to Aberdeen to get the kids, staying over for the night in our camp and driving down in the afternoon to get the next dose of radiotherapy so now I am "medium rare" and have two more treatments before I am "well done". However after the treatment today I had to call my friend John and then just crashed out in bed for three hours exhausted. It seems like the fatigue which had been predicted as a result of the radiotherapy is now arriving and I have that old double jet lag feeling again, I can keep going when I have to but once I stop I fall asleep at the drop of a hat!

So tonight we are all home, Holly is sorting out the mail beside me, and all is well in the world, talk to you all tomorrow !

Gerry