It has been a quiet (relatively) week with my family this week. I have been sleeping a lot. The time I am up I have been spending with the kids. I am trying to spend time regularly on their reading and we went to a model railway exhibition on the weekend.
I am in week 2 of cycle 24 of Xeloda, which is an oral chemotherapy. It is good because it is oral I only have to go to the hospital to see the oncologist and pick up my chemo every three weeks. It is tablets morning and night. It tends to make me feel sick in the mornings and it makes me very tired, just like most chemotherapy drugs. But it is great in that it doesn’t kill hair cells, so my hair is growing quite long since I last lost it, in 2010/2011 when I was on a different chemo. It is also great that I don’t have to be in hospital away from the kids.
When I started this particular chemo I asked the doctor how long I could take it for if it was successful. She said that it is usually effective for 10-15 cycles, then the effect wears off, the cancer starts to thrive again, and you have to change to a different chemo – a new mode of attack I guess. Well, that was 24 cycles ago (each cycle is 3 weeks, 2 weeks on the drug, and 1 week to recover) and it is still working. I’m basically having it to stop the progression of the cancer, to prolong my life, and that is exactly what it is doing! I am so pleased that it is still working, we have become friends of sorts over the last year, me and Xeloda; it is doing what I need it to do and not causing me too much pain in the process. I hope I can stay on it for a long while yet!
Who knows, maybe while Samuel is breaking the world record for longest distance travelled on a unicycle, I could try to break the world record for longest effective treatment time on Xeloda! Wouldn’t that be great?
With Easter coming up, and having a child with allergies to milk, eggs and nuts, I have been in the kitchen melting down milk free chocolate and trying to fashion it into something resembling Easter eggs. By the time Hammy is 18, and no longer interested in Easter egg hunts, I may well master the process. Let me tell you, it is no mean feat, the little solid ones are easy enough, but the big hollow ones, wow, they are a challenge. I have managed to break far more than I have successfully constructed. Hopefully he will be happy with the result and won’t mind that they are far from perfect. He is a nice kid, very accepting of his allergies so he should enjoy the hunt anyway.
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