Eat up your gruel

I wasn't going to do this again. Not for a while. In fact I have a very slight blog ready to go about ambulances, but a number of people have asked or sent me messages so, I'll do my best to make it short and sweet. Yet another update on me and throat cancer.

Nothing has changed in the treatment stakes. I've now done 25 of the 33 sessions of radiotherapy. An ambulance collects me from home and deposits me back here a few hours later. It can be as few as four hours from start to finish and as many as six and a half. The treatment takes about twenty minutes and the rest of it is waiting or travelling time and the occasional medical Q&A. Yesterday the ambulance from Alicante brought me home via Biar. Locals can gasp and chortle. 

I've done two of the three chemotherapy sessions. The third and, hopefully, final session is on Monday 14th provided that there is no medical reason for not going ahead - apparently things like anaemia, lack of platelets, reduced kidney function etc., can make the process unsafe which is why I have to get a blood test a few days before to check that I'm up to it.

This morning I got a bit of a pep talk from the nurse at the radiotherapy unit. She seems to be the person charged with keeping an eye on me. Her main concern is that I am losing weight. In fact my face had thinned out so much that the original "death mask" that they use to strap me to the table and to target the rays, was no longer up to the job. I had to have a new mask made and a new CAT scan done so they could pinpoint the tumours in relation to the new mask. We had a bit of a chat about this weight loss. As I pointed out I'm still hardly skinny - teetering on the boundary between overweight and obese using that Body Mass Index system. The nurse guffawed when I told her that. She checked. She seemed genuinely surprised when I was right. I explained, in Spanish, about the English word moobs. It didn't stop her though. She wants me to "eat" more. Now I haven't actually eaten anything since 19 September. Since then I have been connecting a squelchy plastic bag full of some all in one food supplement to the tube that comes out of my stomach. The bag is hung on high and it just drip, drip, drips into my stomach. the original plan was for three feeds a day, 600 calories a go. I've now been told to go for four feeds a day. It's a laborious process and the food stinks but I'll do what I can.

Actually saying the food stinks is something else. Cooking food, kitchen waste bins, the porridge residue in the plug hole etc., smell absolutely disgusting. Maggie tells me that things are no more smelly than normal though she says I have fetid breath. I'm not surprised. Nowadays I go to bed early, alone, in the guest room. I get to sleep easily enough but however long I stay asleep, till the first time I wake up, is usually the major part of the sleep I'm going to get. From there on in it's just tossing, turning and maybe a bit of snoozing. When I wake up, at say 3am, my mouth is lined with mixtures of phlegm, slime, and blood or snot tinted gobs of something horrible. Then again, someone has lined my mouth with sawdust. So I'm choking on dust and something as slimy as that Creature from the Black Lagoon at the same time. I can try to brush and mouthwash my mouth back into action but, if any of the liquids, including the "medical" mouthwash which, if it were sold in a standard size whisky bottle, would come in at 85€, touches the back of my throat I am wont to retch and throw up on the yellowy liquid I put into my stomach. It is a singularly unpleasant experience. 

The radiotherapy people are adamant that the majority of my problems are being caused by the whole body treatment which is chemotherapy. They accept that the radiotherapy has reddened my skin caused quite a lot of exfoliation but not much else. And that was the point of the pep talk from the nurse to tell me that with my only real complaints being my throat, a fair amount of throwing up with a bit of side grumbling about the ringing in my ears and how the lowering of my blood pressure makes me wobble, literally, from time to time, I was getting away with this almost consequence free so far. So, my lad, buck your ideas up and make sure you lose no more weight.

"Yes, Lourdes", was all of my reply.