Janet's blog

 Clinic and treatment days are at the better end of the fortnightly round, but the past fortnight has been a bit grim. The trial started fairly gently back in September/October and I was hopeful it wouldn't be too destructive of everyday life, but things have been going downhill - badly enough for the chat to have started being about leaving the trial or at least having a fortnight break. It's a mix of increasingly active guts and an increasing level of 'chemo' type effects. Perhaps not so much the plummetting haemoglobin just now. The gut situation has become ridiculous: I'm housebound and tethered to the loo for far too many days in the fortnight now and anxious about going out on other days - it's still possible that there's an element of unfortunately-located cancer to it, but feel it must be partly the treatment. I still don't feel as straight nauseous as on the previous chemotherapies, so there doesn't seem to be much risk of actually throwing ...

 Here we go again. Cycled in again - 3rd time in this week - did't feel quite so bad although still puffing and blowing. It's nice to think that I might have made a bit of my own Hb, or have slightly increased my fitness but maybe it's just that there was no headwind - don't think there was a tailwind. And going in later with no tube strike meant fewer stops and restarts in much reduced traffic, so I could take advantage of gravity for longer stretches - hoorah. Chemo Daycare's looking very busy on arrival at 12:30, which is already a late start, so have been pushy and texted the trial practitioner in case I need someone in my corner to make sure I don't end up missing treatment again due to time constraints. If that happened I'd be depressed/mightily pissed off/despairing - must burrow into the online Thesaurus to find some more original words although I still prefer to leaf through the grubby pages of the hard copy one - I just managed to intercept Christo...

 Haemoglobin was 97 at Tuesday clinic. Resistance offered by Highgate North Hill to being cycled up today suggests it has dropped further, but options are few on a tube strike day and it has been even harder work! Traffic on Tuesday strike day was epic - the jam started outside the closed gates of East Finchley station and fumed ahead all the way to the Macmillan Centre. Just a few gaps to allow some eejits to roar past in a cloud of particulates before coming to a finger-tapping halt at the next traffic regulation measure.  Traffic lighter today; most anxiety induced by a bloke who had either never ridden a bike before or who had forgotten how - using up a lot of unavailable road zigzagging to get his balance then thinking he could squeeze between a couple of shiny apples of their drivers' eyes without provoking a flurry of F words - he couldn't. The other stand out indicator of a strike-day cyclist is the accompanying sound of a maintenance-free bike - the squealing brakes, ...